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MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

OF

ANCIENT GREECE.

VOL. I.

Price 31s. 6d.

NOTICE.

The Proprietors of Circulating Libraries in all parts of the country are compelled by the new Copyright Act to discontinue purchasing and lending out a single copy of a foreign edition of an English work. The mere having it in their possession ticketed and marked as a library book, exposes them to

A PENALTY OF TEN POUNDS.

Several clauses of the new Copyright Act award severe punishments for introducing and exposing for sale or hire pirated editions of English works, both in Great Britain and in the Colonies. The Government absolutely prohibits the introduction of these nefarious reprints through the Custom-houses on any pretence whatever. The public should be made fully and perfectly aware that, in consequence of a Treasury Order to that effect, even single copies of works so pirated, brought in a traveller’s baggage, which were formerly admissible, are so no longer, unless they be cut, the name written in them, and, moreover, so WORN and used as to render them unfit for sale; and that if afterwards they are found in a Circulating Library, the Proprietor is subject to a severe penalty. Two clauses of the new Customs’ Act, moreover, exclude them altogether after the commencement of the next financial year. These measures will, no doubt, be rigorously enforced both at home and in the Colonies.

TOPOGRAPHY OF SPARTA.

THE HISTORY
OF THE
MANNERS AND CUSTOMS
OF
ANCIENT GREECE.

BY J. A. ST. JOHN.

IN THREE VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

LONDON:

RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,

Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.

1842.

LONDON:

PRINTED BY S. AND J. BENTLEY, WILSON, AND FLEY,

Bangor House, Shoe Lane.

DEDICATION.

TO BAYLE ST. JOHN.

I dedicate the following work to you, my dear Son, as a token of my gratitude for the cheerful patience with which you have aided me in completing it, despite the calamity that overtook me in the midst of my labours. Whatever may be the fate of the publication it will always recall to me some of the happiest hours of my life, rendered so chiefly by beholding the contented serenity with which you subdued the irksomeness of studies so little suited to your years. At length, however, you are delivered from lexicographers and scholiasts. The final page has been written, the last proof read. I escape from a task commenced before you were born, and you from a four years’ apprenticeship to the craft and mystery of authorship. All that now remains is to watch the reception which the fruit of our toil may meet with in the world. It has been produced and has grown up under very peculiar circumstances. Whithersoever we have travelled, the wrecks of Grecian literature have accompanied us, and the studies to which these pages owe their existence have been pursued under the influence of almost every climate in Europe. Nay, if I pushed my researches still further and visited the portion of Africa commonly supposed to have been the cradle of Hellenic civilisation, it was solely in the hope of qualifying myself to speak with some degree of confidence on the subject of those arts which represent to the Modern World so much of the grandeur and genius of Greece. Here, probably, the action of pestilential winds, and of the sands and burning glare of the desert commenced that dimming of the “visual ray,” which, in all likelihood, will wrap me gradually in complete darkness, and veil for ever from my sight those forms of the beautiful which have been incarnated, if I may so speak, in marble. This is a language which neither you nor your sister can read to me. All that sweet Olympian brood which used to smile upon me with kindly recognition when I was a solitary wayfarer in lands not my own, will, as far as I am concerned, be annihilated. Those twelve mystical transformations of Aphroditè into stone, which may be beheld all together at Naples, and appeared to me more lovely than its vaunted bay, or even the sky that hangs enamoured over it, will, I conjecture, be seen of me no more, or seen obscurely as through a mist. Homer, however, and Æschylus, with Plato and Thucydides and Demosthenes, will be able still through the voices of my children—voices more cheerful and willing than ministered to the old age and blindness of Milton—to project their beauty into my soul. I will not, therefore, repine; but, imitating the example of wiser and better men, submit unmurmuringly to the will of God. Had things been otherwise ordered, I might have continued these researches. As it is, I take leave of them here. Our friend, Mr. Keightley, who has visited Italy for the purpose, will perform for the Romans what I have endeavoured to accomplish for the Greeks; and his extensive and varied learning, the excellence of his method, and the pleasing vivacity of his style, will, probably, ensure for his work a still greater degree of popularity even than that which his very successful productions already enjoy.

Believe me, my dear son,

Ever affectionately yours,

J. A. St. JOHN.

London,

October 13th, 1842.

INTRODUCTION.

Many moral phenomena appear to baffle the sagacity of statesmen, because, confiding too implicitly in experience, they omit to widen the range of their contemplation so as to embrace the whole circle of the people’s existence whose fortunes and character they desire to comprehend. To be successful in such an inquiry it is requisite to lay open, as far as possible, the influence on that people of climate and geographical position, to break through the husk and shell of customs, manners, laws, religions, that we may come to the kernel of its moral nature, to that inner organization, intellectual and physical, of which the external circumstances of its civil and political life are but so many fluctuating symbols.

To accomplish this, however, even in the case of a contemporary nation, among whom we may behold in full activity all the material movements of society, is no easy task. But the difficulty must be very much augmented, when, in addition to the obstacles which necessarily under the most favourable circumstances beset every avenue to a people’s inner life, those are added arising out of the distance on the track of time at which the nation we are considering happens to stand, the scantiness and contradictory nature of the reports that reach us, and more, perhaps, than all, the atmosphere of prejudice through which we are apt to view whatever in any degree differs from our own manners and institutions. But this consideration, though it should bespeak indulgence for the unavoidable errors even of the most diligent investigator, can certainly be no reason for abstaining from all further investigation. For, notwithstanding the disadvantages under which we labour, it is still possible to extract from the fragments remaining of ancient literature materials for reconstructing something more than the skeleton of antiquity. We can invest the bones with sinews and muscles, clothe them with flesh and skin, spread over the whole colours that shall resemble life; and if we cannot steal from heaven celestial fire to kindle this image of surpassing beauty, that, at least, is the only thing which exceeds our power.

In saying this, I merely state my opinion of what is possible, not by any means what I conceive myself to have effected in the present work. I am but too sensible of how far the execution falls short of “the ample proposition that hope made,” when, many years ago, the idea suggested itself to me at that ardent and flattering season of life in which we are apt to imagine all things within our reach. But as

Every action that hath gone before

Whereof we have record, trial did draw

Bias, and thwart; not answering the aim

And that unbodied figure of the thought

That gave ’t surmised shape;

so, no doubt, in my own case, the realisation will be found to be a very imperfect embodying of the ideal plan.

Few subjects, however, abound more in interest or instruction than the one I have here ventured to treat. The inquiry turns upon the institutions and moral condition of a people to whose fortunes history affords no parallel; of a people that, like the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, which the servant of the prophet saw from the top of Carmel, contained within itself the seeds of mightiest and most momentous events. The Hellenes can never, in fact, by any but the uninformed be regarded in the same light as ordinary political communities. Their power, vast and astonishing for the age in which they flourished, arose entirely out of their national character and the spirit of their institutions. It was the power of intellect. They were in reality the sun and soul of the ancient world, and darted far into the darkness around them those vivifying rays which, reflected from land to land, have since lighted up the world.

Athens, the wisest and noblest of Grecian states,

Mother of arts

And eloquence,

was the great preceptress of mankind. The spirit of her laws, transmitted through those of Rome, still pervades the whole civilized world. Her wisdom and her arts form, in all polished communities, a principal object of study; and to comprehend and to enjoy them is to be a gentleman. Sallust, therefore, notwithstanding his genius and sagacity, took but a commonplace view of national greatness, when he considered that of Athens to be chiefly based on the splendour shed around her achievements by historians. Her triumphs, it is true, were not effected by vast military masses, such as those which many barbarous nations in different ages have put in motion for the purpose of spoil or conquest. Athens built her glory on other foundations. She could not, indeed, lead countless armies into the field, but she knew how, with a little band, to defeat those who could. In the days of her freedom no human force could subdue her. To effect this, every man within the borders of Attica must have been exterminated; for so long as an Athenian was left, the indomitable spirit of democracy would have survived in him and sufficed to kindle up fresh contests.

But the energies of Athens, how great soever, did not, like those of most other states, develope themselves chiefly in war. It is the characteristic of barbarians to destroy, but to create nothing. The delight and glory of the people of Athens consisted, on the contrary, in the exercise of creative power, in calling into existence new arts, founding colonies, widening the circle of civilisation, covering the earth with beautiful structures, sacred and civil; in producing pictures, statues, vases, and sculptured gems, of conception and delicacy of workmanship inimitable. Wherever the Athenian set his foot, the very earth appeared to grow more lovely beneath it. His genius beautified whatever it touched. His imagination vivified everything. He spread a rich mythological colouring over land and sea. Gods, at his bidding, entered the antique oak, sported in the waters of brook and fountain, scattered themselves in joyous groups over the uplands and through the umbrageous valleys, and their voices and odoriferous breath mingled with every breeze that blew.

In the distant colonies whither he betook himself, when poverty had relaxed the chain that bound him indissolubly to the Attic soil, a few years saw a new diminutive Athens springing up. The Pnyx, the Odeion, the Theatre of Bacchos, the Prytaneion, the Virgin’s Fane, rose on a diminished scale around him, presenting an image, though faint, of his earlier home, the loveliest, undoubtedly, and, after Jerusalem, the most hallowed spot ever inhabited by man. Above all things, he was everywhere careful to enjoy the blessings of his ancestral institutions, and listened, as in the mother city, to those popular thunders which, thrice in every month, rolled from the bema over the assembled crowd, communicating pleasurable emotions to his mind, and rousing continually the passion for freedom.

It were needless to dwell at any considerable length on the naval and military achievements of the Athenians. The world is still full of the victories of Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa, and the soil, drenched in defence of liberty with Attic blood, is to this day sacred in the eyes of the most phlegmatic. I appeal in proof of this to every man’s daily experience: for does not the bare mention of any spot where the great Demos triumphed or suffered some national calamity, make the blood bound more rapidly and tingle in our veins? Even the grovelling and worldly-minded, who affect to consider nothing holy but Mammon, can have fire struck out of their cold natures by the spell of those glorious syllables; for virtue, and valour, and that religious link which binds the soul to the spot where a mother’s dust reposes, are found, and will ever be found, to kindle warm admiration in every heart. And never since society began did these great qualities develope themselves more visibly than among the people of Athens. For this reason, who can visit Syracuse, or the shores of the Hellespont, or the site of Memphis’s White Castle, without experiencing as he gazes on the scene an electrical thrill of mental anguish at the recollection of what Athenian citizens more than two thousand years ago suffered there? Even Thermopylæ, glorious as it is, scarcely stirs our nature so deeply as Marathon; for the coarser and more material genius and institutions of Sparta, the nurse of those heroes who fell at the Gates of Hellas inspire less of that fervent admiration which the great actions and great men of Athens awaken in every cultivated mind.

Of the political institutions which throughout Hellas influenced so powerfully the developement of the national character, it is not my design in the present volumes to speak. I confine myself entirely to the other causes which rendered the ancient Greeks what they were; reserving the examination of their forms of government for a separate treatise. The subject here discussed possesses sufficient interest of itself. It has been my aim to open up as far as possible a prospect into the domestic economy of a Grecian family, the arts, comforts, conveniences, regulations affecting the condition of private life, and those customs and manners which communicated a peculiar character and colour to the daily intercourse of Greek citizens. For, in all my investigations about the nature and causes of those ancient institutions which, during so many ages constituted the glory and the happiness of the most highly gifted race known to history, I found my attention constantly directed to the circumstances of their private life, from which, as from a great fountain, all their public prosperity and grandeur seemed to spring.

Indeed, the great sources of a nation’s happiness and power must always lie about the domestic hearth. There or nowhere are sown, and for many years cherished by culture, all those virtues which bloom afterwards in public, and form the best ornaments of the commonwealth. Men are everywhere exactly what their mothers make them. If these are slaves, narrow-minded, ignorant, unhappy, those in their turn will be so also. The domestic example, small and obscure though it be, will impress its image on the state; since that which individually is base and little, can never by congregating with neighbouring littleness, become great, or lead to those heroic efforts, those noble self-sacrifices, which elevate human nature to a sphere in which it appears to touch upon and partake something of the divine.

By minutely studying, as far as practicable, those small obscure sanctuaries of Greek civilisation—the private dwellings of Attica--I hoped to discover the secret of that moral alchemy by which were formed

Those dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule

Our spirits from their urns.

In these haunts, little familiar to our imagination, lay concealed the germs of law, good government, philosophy, the arts, and whatever else has tended to soften and render beautiful the human clay. That this was the case is certain; why it should have been so, we may perhaps be unable satisfactorily to explain; but that is what we shall at least attempt in the present work, and for this purpose, it will at the first glance be apparent, that the most elaborate delineation of the political institutions of Athens must prove altogether insufficient. These were but one among many powerful causes. The principal lay deeper in a combination of numerous circumstances:—a peculiarly perfect and beautiful physical organization; a mind fraught with enthusiasm, force, flexibility, and unrivalled quickness; a buoyancy of temper which no calamity could long depress; consequent, probably, upon this, a strong religious feeling ineradicably seated in the heart; an unerring perception of the beautiful in art and nature; and lastly, the enjoyment of a genial climate, and an atmosphere pure, brilliant, and full of sunshine as their minds.

Races of men, though not in precisely the same manner as individuals, yet exhibit, at particular periods of their history, a freshness, a vigour, a disinterestedness, like that of youth; and, because this state of feeling may more than once occur in the course of their career, they seem to spring, like Æson, out of convulsions and apparent dissolution to a state of perfect rejuvenescence. Calamity and suffering purify whole communities as they do individuals. In the boiling and commotion of revolutions the impurities of the national character bubble upwards and are skimmed away by the iron hand of misfortune. These political convulsions are, in fact, so many efforts of nature to expel some disease lurking in the constitution, and which, though the race be immortal, might, if suffered to remain in the frame, produce a lethargy worse than death. This truth we should bear constantly in mind; for among the characteristics of the Athenian constitution, not the least remarkable are the many efforts it made to right itself, and adapt its framework to the changing circumstances of the times.

In the present inquiry we must, as I have already said, discover, if we can, how much Hellas owed to its climate, to its position on the globe, and to the physical organization of its inhabitants. It would be absurd to infer with some writers, that the influence of these circumstances is imaginary, because Greece seems to remain where it was of old, and the constitution and temperament of the people to be likewise unchanged. But this is not the case. Greece no longer occupies in the map of the world the position it occupied in antiquity. It has been lifted out of the centre of civilisation, to be cast upon its outskirts, or, which is the same thing, civilisation has shifted its seat. Nor are the Greeks any longer what they formerly were, though perhaps by a fortunate combination of circumstances they might still be rendered so. At present there is the same difference between them and their ancestors as between a jar of Falernian, and an empty jar. The clay, indeed, is there, beautifully moulded, and the purple hue of life is on the cheek; but tyranny from the battle of Cheronæa,

“That dishonest victory

Fatal to liberty!”

until now has been draining out the soul. In the day when Hellas was itself its children walked in light, in the first beautiful light of the morning, which long seemed to shine only upon them; and now, perhaps, after the revolution of a cycle almost equal to the Great Year, they may, probably, be approaching another dawn.

Comparing the several states of Greece together, it is customary to bestow the palm of energy and military valour upon the Spartans, who made war their sole profession, and passed their lives as it were in the camp from the cradle to the grave. But, in thus deciding, justice is scarcely done to the character of Athens; for, if the former excelled in discipline, to the latter belonged, indisputably, the superiority in native courage. Trained or not trained they faced whatever enemy presented himself, and won at least as many laurels from Sparta, on the ocean, as the Doric State, in all its wars, ever gathered on land. And, lastly, at Platæa, among which race, among Ionians or Dorians, was most activity manifested? In whose ranks was found the greatest ardour to engage? Who bore the first brunt of the Median horse, and broke the dreaded shock of that vaunted Asiatic chivalry which the Barbarian hoped would have trampled down with its innumerable hoofs the spirit of Grecian freedom? This was effected by the Athenians; by those gay and seemingly effeminate soldiers, who went forth from their beautiful city curled, perfumed, clad in purple, as to the mimic combats of the theatre. The spirit of their commonwealth, all splendour without and all energy within, urged them to the field. Their cry at the approach of the king was “Freedom or honourable graves!”—such as their countrymen had ever been wont to repose in.

In fact, the Athenians, under a free government, had learned what it was to live—had imbibed from their education the feeling, that if deprived of such a government, if reduced to bow beneath the yoke of despotism, to die, if the Apostle’s words may without blame be thus applied, would be gain. It will readily be conceived that the citizens of such a state felt an impassioned attachment to their country,—an attachment unintelligible to persons living under any other form of civil polity. Athens was the cradle of their freedom and their happiness. There was a religion in the love they bore it; they had, according to mythical traditions, which they believed, sprung on that spot from the bosom of the earth. It stood, therefore to them in the dearest of all relations, being, to sum up everything holy in one word,—their Mother; and they embodied their profound veneration for the sacred spot in every fond, every endearing, epithet their matchless language could supply. Even the gods, in their patriotic partiality, were believed to look on Athens as the most lovely, no less than the most glorious city on the broad earth,—an idea which they expressed by representing Poseidon and Athena contending for the honour of becoming their tutelar divinity.

To persons so thinking no calamity short of the entire extinction of their race could appear so intolerable as beholding that sacred city, with the tombs of their ancestors, the sanctuaries of their gods, the venerable but immoveable symbols of their faith and mythological history, delivered over to be trodden down or obliterated with sword and fire by barbarian slaves, strong only from their countless numbers. Yet even to this did the love of freedom reconcile the Athenian people. They abandoned their holy place, and, embarking on board the fleet with their wives and children, took refuge in Trœzen and Salamis. History has described in touching language the circumstances of this event, than which it has nothing more pathetic to record save, peradventure, the carrying away of Judea and her children into captivity. I will not disturb its archaic simplicity. No eloquence could heighten its effect. It goes at once to the heart and rouses our noblest sympathies. “The embarkation of the people of Athens was a very affecting scene. What pity, what admiration of the firmness of those men who, sending their parents and families to a distant place, unmoved with their cries and embraces, had the fortitude to leave the city and embark for Salamis! What greatly heightened the distress was the number of citizens whom, on account of their extreme old age, they were forced to leave behind. And some emotions of tenderness were due even to the tame domestic animals which, running to the shore with lamentable howlings, expressed their affection and regret for the persons by whom they had been fed. One of these, a dog belonging to Xanthippos, the father of Pericles, unwilling to be left, is said to have leaped into the sea and to have swam by the side of the galley till it reached Salamis, where, quite spent with toil, it immediately died. And they show, to this day, a place called Cynossema—‘the dog’s grave’—where they tell us it was buried.”[^[1]]

The Athenian people, on this and similar occasions, were enabled to resolve and perform boldly from the generous spirit inspired by their national system of education. Their institutions, also, were eminently calculated to bring into play the energies of every individual citizen, and to diffuse in consequence through the whole community a grandeur of sentiment and an heroic enthusiasm peculiar to free states. At Athens whoever possessed the means of serving his country could easily, whatever might be his rank, make those means known, and bring them into operation. If he were virtuous his virtue was remarked and placed him on the road to promotion. If genius constituted his title to distinction, if nature had gifted him with the power to serve the state, the state, without inquiry whether he were poor or rich, readily availed itself of his capacity, rewarded him during his life with political honours and authority, and, after his death, with imperishable glory. If in war he performed any act of superior conduct or courage, a general’s name was his reward; if he received wounds that name, or the hope of it, healed them; if in the achieving of any heroic deed he perished, his country, he knew, would honour his ashes, watch over his memory, and, with words powerfully soothing because embodying a nation’s sympathy, dry up the tears of his parents and beloved children. He knew that his glory, heightened by matchless masters of eloquence, would flash like lightning from the bema; that lovely bosoms would beat high at his name; that hands, the fairest in Greece, would yearly wreath his tomb with garlands; and that tears would be shed for ever on the spot by the brave.

If children remained behind him, the state would become their parent; every Athenian would share with them his salt; would impart to them their best inheritance—the feeling of patriotism and an inextinguishable hatred of tyranny; would repeat to them with unenvious pride the eulogy of their father, and point daily to the laurels which kept his grave ever green. The Athenian was taught, from the cradle, to consider death beautiful when met on the red battle-field in defence of his home. And, according to the creed of his country, he believed that his spirit would in such an event be numbered among the objects of public worship. Hence the sublimity, the thrilling power of that oath in Demosthenes, who, in swearing by the souls of those that fell at Marathon, accomplished their apotheosis and placed them among the gods of Athens.

That such were the habitual feelings of this most gallant and generous-minded people appears even from the admission of their bitterest enemies. “They,” observe, in Thucydides, the Corinthian ambassadors, when urging Sparta into the Peloponnesian war,—"they push victory to the utmost, and are least of all men dejected by defeat; exposing their bodies for their country as if they had no interest in them, yet applying their minds in the public service as if that and their private interest were one. Disappointment of a proposed acquisition they consider as a loss of what already belonged to them; success in any pursuit they esteem only as a step towards farther advantages; and, defeated in any attempt, they turn immediately to some new project by which to make themselves amends: insomuch, that, through their celerity in executing whatever they propose, they seem to have the peculiar faculty of at the same time hoping and possessing. Thus they continue ever amid labours and dangers, enjoying nothing through sedulity to acquire; esteeming that only a time of festival in which they are prosecuting their projects; and holding rest as a greater evil than the most laborious business. To sum up their character, it may be truly said, that they were born neither to enjoy quiet themselves, nor to suffer others to enjoy it."[^[2]]

The feeling that what they fought for was their own, which accounts for the heroism of Hellenic armies, likewise led, particularly at Athens, to the beautifying and adorning of the city, and the perfection of public taste. The people saw among them no palaces devoted to the private luxuries of a despotic court, where persons maintained at the public expense learn to look with contempt on the honest hands that support them. There, whatever was magnificent belonged to the people at large, no private individuals, during the best ages of the commonwealth, presuming, how great soever might be their talents or their influence, to arrogate to themselves more than can be due to individuals, or to enshrine their perishable bodies in buildings suited only to the worship of God. Yet, in genuine grandeur, no monarch, with the wealth of half a world at the disposal of his caprice, ever rivalled the Athenian people. True taste, the genuine sense of the beautiful and the sublime, will, while the world endures, refuse to be the subject of a tyrant, or to inhabit the same city with him; because no patronage, pensions, or lavish expenditure, can create in one state of society what belongs to another; and pure taste being nothing more than the cultivated popular feeling spontaneously expanding, can nowhere exist but in a free state. A prince may, doubtless, know what pleases him; but the people only can tell what pleases the people, which nothing certainly will unless it be produced expressly for them, without the slightest reference to any other person.

Such, in the best periods of Grecian history, were the Athenians. Among them Nature generally was allowed to make herself heard; from the cradle upwards it was their guide. A pure religion they had not, or pure morality. Far from it; they barely caught indistinct glimpses of what in faith and practice is true and beautiful. Nor could it be otherwise; for the sun had not then risen, and men but felt their way uncertainly and timidly amid the obscurities of the dawn. Nevertheless, the light vouchsafed them they did not spurn. According to the best notions then prevailing, they were of all men the most pious; and though of this piety much, nay, the greater part, was superstition, yet, doubtless, God, according to the saying of the Apostle, accounted it unto them for righteousness, that, having not the law, they were a law unto themselves.

The Spartans, on the other hand, were mere monastic soldiers, brave, indeed, and true as their swords, but ungifted with those loftier and more exquisite sympathies which properly constitute the beauty of human character, and are alone the parents of love. Few, perhaps, were all things within their reach, would choose to be citizens of Sparta; while no one, for whom the poetry of life has any charms, would hesitate, after his own country, perhaps, to select Athens for his home. And that this is no scholastic fancy created by literary preferences is clear from the practice of antiquity. Every man possessing superior genius, whether sprung from Ionic or Doric race, betook himself to Athens, as to the Greece of Greece—the common country of letters, sciences, and arts. Thither, too, as now to London, fled the oppressed and persecuted of all lands, and there they found welcome and encouragement. It was the great asylum, the common city of refuge to all men. Strangers who could be content with hospitality and generous protection were never driven from thence. There every man might live as he pleased, think as he pleased, and utter freely what he thought. The recorded instances of persecution are barely sufficiently numerous to serve as exceptions to the general rule; and in Gorgias of Leontium, Polos, Protagoras, Prodicos, Hippias, “and what the Cynic impudence uttered,” we discover to how great an extent the spirit of toleration was carried at Athens. It would be absurd to object the examples of Anaxagoras, Aspasia, and Socrates; for these were merely instances of the rage of party spirit, from which, while men continue men, no state will ever be free, and can no more be imputed to the Athenian people, or to the spirit of their government, than the execution of Sir Thomas More, or Cranmer, or Fisher, can be laid to the charge of the English Constitution.

CONTENTS
OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

THE HISTORY

OF THE

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

OF

ANCIENT GREECE.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.
ORIGINAL INHABITANTS OF HELLAS.

The country of the Hellenes, which, in imitation of the Romans, we denominate Greece, was to its own inhabitants known by the name of Hellas. But the signification of this term was not fixed, being sometimes confined to Greece Proper, at others, comprehending likewise the possessions of the Hellenes in Asia; that is, Hellas within and beyond the Ægæan, as we now say, India within and beyond the Ganges.[^[3]] The progress of the name seems to have been as follows: it designated, originally,[^[4]] a city of Thessaly, built by Hellen son of Deucalion; next, Phthiotis; the whole of Thessaly; all Greece, with the exception sometimes of Peloponnesos, sometimes of Macedonia, sometimes,—which is very remarkable,—of Thessaly itself; sometimes of Epeiros; then all Greece within the Ægæan; afterwards all countries inhabited by Greeks in whatever part of the world; and, lastly, it would appear to have been occasionally employed to signify Athens alone.[^[5]] The most ancient name, Pelasgia, sprang from the race who first, perhaps, peopled that part of Europe.

Nearly all writers who treat of Grecian history or antiquities, have ventured more or less upon inquiries respecting the original inhabitants of the country, some contending that it was peopled by many independent races, while others content themselves with supposing one primary stock. To arrive at certainty in such investigations is scarcely to be hoped for, since, over the whole field, facts have moved in so close a conjunction with fables, “that the most which remaineth to be seen, is the show of dark and obscure steps where some part of the truth hath gone.”[^[6]] It appears, however, to be a fact established, that the Hellenes were not the first who occupied Greece. They were preceded by a number of tribes all apparently of Pelasgian origin. But who and what the Pelasgians were, how and whence they came into the country, and by what gradations and influences they were ripened into Hellenes, or were by these expelled from the land, are questions to which no satisfactory answers have ever been given, but must still be discussed whatever the result of the investigation may be.

Even the name of this people has opened up an endless labyrinth of conjecture, at least among the moderns, for the ancients when such points were to be cleared up, easily removed the difficulty by inventing a hero or a demigod, with an appellation exactly suited to their purpose. Thus from Hellen they derived the name of the Hellenes, from Heracles that of Heracleidæ, from Ion that of the Ionians, and from Pelasgos, the son sometimes of Zeus, sometimes of Poseidon, sometimes of Triops or Inachos or Lycaon or Palachthon or of the earth itself,[^[7]] that of the Pelasgi. An Attic writer, familiar with this question, and hinting at a part of the theory which I have adopted, imagines the name of Pelasgi to have been at first bestowed on the race because they usually made their appearance on the shores of Hellas like migratory birds in spring.[^[8]] But though conjecture in such matters may amuse, it is not likely, at this distance of time, to lead to truth.

The ancients had evidently formed no theory as to whence the Pelasgi came, but were satisfied with the notion of their autochthoneïty,[^[9]] which we cannot adopt. It must be acknowledged, however, that we are little able to trace them with certainty beyond the limits of Greece, before their arrival in that country. My own opinion is, that when the migrations began from that vast and lofty table land of Central Asia, which formed the primitive abode of mankind, and where the mother language of the Sanskrit, the Greek, and many other dialects was first spoken, the illustrious race, afterwards known under the name of Pelasgi, moved westward by the Caspian, along the Caucasian range, through Armenia and Kourdistân, until they descended into the plains of Asia Minor. Here we seem to touch upon the obscurest verge of Grecian fable, for the tradition which sent Argo to Colchis, at the Eastern extremity of the Black Sea, evidently contemplated the people of the land as a kindred race, of similar faith, character, and manners. By what precise channel the stream of population rolled westward, cannot be determined: but here and there, on the southern shores of the Euxine, we discover some obscure footsteps of the parents of the Greeks, as they continued their journeyings towards the land which they were afterwards to encircle with glory. Moving through Pontos, Paphlagonia, and Bithynia, they appear everywhere to have made settlements on the coast, until they reached the narrow stream of the Bosporos, over which they threw themselves into Europe.

Up to this point we have little whereon to build our conclusions, save what is supplied by the general theory of ancient migrations, and what appear to be facts dimly seen within the extreme orbit of mythology. The ancients themselves seem to have obtained some uncertain glimpses of links connecting their ancestors with Asiatic Scythia, for there were those among them who represented the Caucons of Paphlagonia stretching along the banks of the Parthenios, and between the Maryandinians and the sea, as a nation of Scythian origin. Now the Caucons were undoubtedly Pelasgians, as were the Phrygians, the Carians, and the Leleges, who, united by the ties of blood, flocked to the defence of Troy.[^[10]] In a much remoter age, the heroes of the traditional Argo were, it is said, confounded by night at Cyzicos,[^[11]] in Mysia, with the warlike Pelasgi, even then masters of the sea, and accustomed with their galleys to vex the coast and plunder the settled inhabitants. I regard the working of the gold and silver mines on the southern shores of the Euxine, anterior to the Trojan war, as another proof of the settlement of the Pelasgi in that part of Asia Minor;[^[12]] and who but they, at a period beyond the reach of tradition, could have opened those gold mines on the shores of Thrace, which on his conquest of the country Philip of Macedon found to have been long ago worked and abandoned by some unknown people?[^[13]]

Be this as it may, it was over the Bosporos and through Thrace that the Pelasgi seem to have made their earliest approaches towards Greece. The Thracians themselves were of Pelasgian origin. Thracians inhabited both sides of the Bosporos; traces of Pelasgian settlements and Pelasgian names are likewise found on both sides. The stream of knowledge unquestionably poured through Thrace into Greece; and it is highly probable that the stream of population had, at a remoter period, flowed in the same channel. Once in Macedonia, the adventurers would be tempted southward by the beauty of the climate and country; so that while some moved up the valley of the Haliacmon, others, perhaps, took possession of the ridge of Olympos, Ossa and Pelion, where they were known under the names of Centaurs and Lapithæ.[^[14]] From these lofty ridges they looked down upon the great lake which in those ages covered the whole plain of Thessaly, and, following the ramifications of the mountains, peopled Pelasgian Argos, Phthiotis, and the roots of Œta, while the lowlands were still under water: thence, too, they crossed over into Eubœa, where they assumed the names of Macrones[^[15]] and Curetes. This latter tribe settling at Chalcis,[^[16]] and having been worsted in a contest for the Lalantian plain, fled across the Euripos, and traversing the whole of Bœotia, founded a new settlement about Pleuron in Ætolia, and gave the name of Curetis to the whole country. Hence, also, in process of time, they were driven by the Ætolians from Pisa in Elis, upon which they took refuge in Acarnania.[^[17]]

But the principal tribe, and that which subsequently spread throughout Greece, after filling with population the valley of the Haliacmon, traversing the Caulavian range, and descending along the course of the Aoös, seem on the banks of the Celydnos, to have turned their faces southward. Following that stream upwards towards its source, they found themselves in Epeiros, a land abounding with water brooks, with lovely mountains, and lovelier valleys, and at length settled, and erected themselves lasting habitations in the sacred neighbourhood of Dodona,[^[18]] where the first oracle known to the Hellenes flourished under the protection of the Pelasgian Zeus.[^[19]]

Up to this point we have been treading, with little or no light to guide us, over a soil shifting, unsure, and treacherous; but here we touch upon comparatively firm ground, while the light of poetry dawns around, and enables us to direct our footsteps towards the luminous terra firma of history.

It must not be denied that much of the foregoing theory is erected on inference and conjecture. Nevertheless, it rests in part on facts which an historian ought not to reject. For example, though it be nowhere, perhaps, distinctly stated that the Thracians were entirely of Pelasgian origin, we are compelled by various circumstances to believe that such was the case: first, Samothrace on the coast was undoubtedly peopled by Pelasgi;[^[20]] secondly, the Macedonians, plainly of the same stock with the Thracians, are acknowledged to have been Pelasgi;[^[21]] and since the Illyrians likewise were a kindred people,[^[22]] we have a line of Pelasgian settlements stretching along the whole northern frontier of Greece, the Ægæan, the Hellespont, and the Propontis, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. The chain of proofs, indeed, is not complete, but appears and disappears alternately, like the stream of the Alpheios, though little doubt can be entertained of the existence of the links which happen to lie out of sight. In nearly every part of Macedonia the footsteps of the Pelasgi are clearly discernible; at Crestona,[^[23]] on the Echidoros in Pœonia; in Emathea, and Bottiœa;[^[24]] and looking at the language of the country, we find it at all times to have been identical with that of Greece. That the same thing must be predicated of Thrace, even in the remotest ages, appears indisputably from this, that her bards, Thamyris and Orpheus traversed the whole of Hellas, and sang their wisdom to its inhabitants; while Olen coming from Lycia, a Pelasgian settlement,[^[25]] likewise brought his kindred songs to the same tolerant and hospitable land.

But to follow the movements of the Pelasgi through Greece itself, where, though no chronology of events can be attempted, our views rest on a stable foundation. Much, however, of our reasoning will be confused or perhaps unintelligible, if it be not borne in mind that the name of the Pelasgi, like that of the Tartars or Arabs, was a general appellation applied to the whole race, while the several tribes bore separate denominations; as the Chaones,[^[26]] the Dryopes, the Leleges, the Caucons, the Cranaans, with many others,[^[27]] precisely as among the Arabs, we find the Ababde, the Mahazi, the Beni Sakker, &c. The Pelasgian tribe which first made its appearance, and became powerful in Epeiros, a country not to be separated from Greece, was that of the Chaones, whose chief seat was Cheimera,[^[28]] at the foot of the Ceraunian mountains. An obscure scholiast, indeed, denominates them barbarians;[^[29]] but as from the best authority we know them to have been Pelasgi, this shows the value of the term in the mouth of the later writers. Another class,—the Levites, perhaps, of those primitive people,—settled amid the oak forests which surrounded the lovely lake of Dodona, where under the name of Selli,[^[30]] they founded the most celebrated oracle of early antiquity. In their habits they remind us of the Sanyasis, and other religious anchorites of India, living from views of penance with unwashed feet, and sleeping on the bare ground. Other tribes renowned of old in Epeiros, and all Pelasgian,[^[31]] were the Thesprotians, the Molossians, the Perrhæbians, and the Dolopians, the last rough mountaineers inhabiting both the eastern and western slopes of Pindos.[^[32]]

When Epeiros had been thus thickly sprinkled with settlements, an earthquake appears to have produced in the range of Pelion the narrow precipitous gap, afterwards known as Tempe, by which the waters of the Thessalian lake discharged themselves into the sea. This happened, we are told, while one Pelasigos[^[33]] reigned over the mountaineers in the district of Hæmonia. They were celebrating a great feast, when a certain slave named Peloros, brought them tidings of what had come to pass, speaking with admiration of the vast plains which were appearing through the ebbing waters. In gratitude for the news he communicated, they caused the man to seat himself at table while both the king and his attendants, in the joy and fulness of their hearts ministered to him. This, it is said, was the origin of the Pelorian festival, afterwards, down to a very late period, celebrated with great pomp and magnificence in Thessaly, where, for the day, masters changed condition with their slaves, and became their servants.[^[34]] The same festival in the Pelasgian settlements of Italy was known down to the latest times, under the name of Saturnalia.

On the interior of Thessaly becoming thus habitable, the Pelasgian tribes of Epeiros, beginning to be straitened for room, and feeling still the original wandering impulse, poured over the heights of Pindos into the valleys of Histiæotis, and moved eastward along the foot of the Cambunian mountains, settling every where as they advanced. The tribe which took this direction bore the name of Perrhæbians, and left traces of their movements in the great Perrhæbian forest, stretching to the foot of Olympos, and in the name of the whole district extending from the Peneios to the northern limits of Thessaly. In this rich and fertile tract they became powerful, spreading their dominion along the banks of the Peneios, quite down to the sea. But the Lapithæ rising into consequence and overcoming the Perrhæbians in battle, reduced a portion of the tribes under their yoke, while the remainder, enamoured of independence, retreated inland, again crossed the Pindos, and established themselves in the upper valley of the Acheloös. About the same time, perhaps, a fragment of this tribe traversing the whole of Thessaly crossed over into Eubœa, where they subdued and took possession of Histiæotis. It was possibly the entrance of these adventurers into the island, pushing fresh waves of population southward, that caused the contest for the Lalantian plain, and the emigration of the Curetes to the continent.

Other Pelasgian tribes established themselves, and became illustrious in Thessaly. The Centaurs, for example, a Lelegian clan inhabiting Mount Pelion, where they were, perhaps, the first tamers of the horse, whence the fable of their double form. Other sections of the Leleges were also found in Thessaly,[^[35]] as were also the Dryopes. In this country,[^[36]] notwithstanding that it must be regarded upon the whole as only the second stage of the Pelasgians in their migrations southward, we find more traces of their power and influence than anywhere else in Northern Greece. Here were two cities, called Larissa; here was Pelasgian Argos;[^[37]] here, too, was a great district known by the name of Pelasgiotis, while that of Pelasgia seems to have preceded Thessaly as the appellation of the whole province.[^[38]] This people, like most others, seem to have had a number of names, to which they were peculiarly attached, which we nearly always find reappearing wherever they formed a settlement. Generally, too, it may be regarded as certain that the more northern were the most ancient: thus we find Pelagonia in the kingdom of Macedon and in Thessaly; Larissa[^[39]] on the Peneios; Larissa Cremaste near the shore. The Dryopes,[^[40]] again, appear first in Epeiros, not far from Dodona; next we find them in Thessaly, then in Doris, finally in Peloponnesos; and Strabo is careful to remark that the last-mentioned were an off-shoot from those in the north.

From Thessaly the tide of population rolled southward;[^[41]] different tribes of Pelasgi, under the name of Leleges, Hyantes, Aones, and Dryopes taking possession of the mountains and valleys of Doris, Locris, Phocis, and extending their migrations into the plains of Bœotia. From thence, across the isthmus, some few straggling hordes appear to have found their way into Peloponnesos, where, as shepherds, they gradually diffused themselves over its rich plains. All the Pelasgi in fact appear like the Arabs and Tartars to have been originally Nomades, different tribes of whom, as they were tempted by the beauty of particular regions, quitted their wandering life, as the Arabs have done in Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere, and from shepherds became husbandmen. In process of time, the descendants of the settlers, accustomed to the easy and luxurious life of cities, learned to look back upon their wandering ancestors as a wretched and a barbarous race. Indeed, they sometimes speak of them[^[42]] after their arrival in Peloponnesos as cannibals, naked, houseless, ignorant of the use of fire, on a level, in short, with the fiercest and most brutal savages existing in the islands of the Pacific. But these erroneous ideas evidently arose from the theory of autochthoneïty which supposes man to have gradually ripened out of a beast into a man; whereas, the low savages discovered in various parts of the world, do not represent the original state of mankind, but are mere instances of extreme degeneracy. In fact, a different set of traditions also prevailed among the Greeks, which, referring evidently to the period when their ancestors were Nomades, spoke with rapture and enthusiasm of their happy and tranquil life, when, following their flocks from vale to vale and from stream to stream, they fed upon the spontaneous productions which nature spread before them. On this period the poets bestowed the name of the Golden Age, and, perhaps, if examined philosophically, there is no stage in the history of civilisation at which there is so much to enjoy and so little to suffer, as when the whole nation are shepherds, and happen to light upon a land where, as yet too few to inconvenience each other, they can live unmolested by foreign tribes.

It has now been shown how Hellas might have been entirely peopled from the north; but certain traditions, prevailing from the earliest times, compel us to admit that some portion, at least, of its population reached it by a different route; that is, through Asia Minor and the islands. I have already alluded briefly to the existence of a Pelasgian tribe in Paphlagonia,[^[43]] that is to say, the Caucons, whose establishment in this region supplies a link in the chain of proofs by which we endeavour to connect the Pelasgi with the Scythians of Central Asia; for the Caucons are admitted to have been of Pelasgian origin, and an opinion prevailed among the ancients that they were likewise Scythians.[^[44]] Thus we find that certain Scythians settled in Paphlagonia, were called Caucons, that the Caucons were Pelasgi, and that the Pelasgi peopled Greece. The Greeks, therefore, by this account, traced their origin to Scythia. Circumstances connected with the geography of Asia Minor and of Hellas, seem to furnish traces of the route of the Pelasgi westward. It appears to have been among the primitive articles of their creed, that the deity delighted to abide on the summits of lofty and even of snowy mountains; and whenever in their settlements the features of the earth presented any such towering eminence, they seem to have bestowed on it the name of Olympos, or Celestial Mansion.[^[45]] Immediately south of the Cauconian settlements, on the limits of Bithynia and Galacia, we accordingly find a mountain of this name; again, travelling westward, we have another Mount Olympos, on the northern confines of Phrygia; a third meets us in the island of Lesbos;[^[46]] a fourth in Cypros, a fifth in Arcadia,[^[47]] a sixth in Elis, and a seventh, best known of all, near the cradle of the Hellenes in Thessaly. In Mysia,[^[48]] the footsteps of the race are numerous; Pelasgian cities—Placia, Scylace, Cyzicos, Antandros—studded the coast; inland there was a Larissa;[^[49]] and the lovely-leafed evergreen, which shaded the slopes and crags of the Trojan Ida, was named the Pelasgian laurel.[^[50]] Other facts there are connecting the Trojans with the Pelasgian stock: thus the Caucons, whom we find among their allies in Homer, are called a Trojan tribe; the language of Troy was evidently a Pelasgian dialect, closely allied to the Greek,[^[51]] which may likewise be predicated of the Phrygian, the Lydian, the Carian, the Lycian extending along the whole western coast of Asia Minor. The gods, oracles, rites, ceremonies of all these people appear in early times to have been identical with those of Hellas, and mythology represents the heroes of both continents as sprung from the same gods. Nay, positive testimony describes the Pelasgi as a great nation, holding the whole western coast of Asia Minor, from Mycale to the Hellespont;[^[52]] and speaks of the Leleges as inhabiting a part of Caria, where their deserted fortifications, called Lelegia,[^[53]] apparently of Cyclopian construction, were still found in the time of Strabo,[^[54]] together with their tombs, probably barrows, resembling those scattered through Peloponnesos, and called the “Tombs of the Phrygians.”[^[55]] Similar sepulchral relics of Carian dominion were found and opened by the Athenians in the purification of Delos.[^[56]] Possibly, too, the tumuli, existing to this day in Tartary, and occasionally rifled by the Siberians, mark the original seat of the Pelasgi in Asia; though similar monuments are found in other parts of the East, as in Nubia, where I counted a cluster of ten or twelve, and nearly all over Europe. Homer speaks of one on the plains of Troy, and the Greeks themselves cast up barrows over their heroes, as Ajax, where

“Far by the solitary shore he sleeps.”

Not to omit any material facts, on which my view of Pelasgian history is founded, I shall proceed to mention in order the principal points on the Asiatic shore where the footsteps of the Pelasgi appear. We find, then, that they occupied the greater part of Lydia,[^[57]] and at the time of the Ionian migration held the citadel of Ephesos. They, too, in conjunction with the Nymphs were the founders of the temple of Hera at Samos,[^[58]] and crossing the Mæander they re-appear again at Miletos on the coast of Caria. Indeed this city[^[59]] was originally, from its inhabitants, called Lelegeis, though it afterwards was known under a variety of names, as Pituoussa from the surrounding pine woods, Anactoria, and lastly, Miletos. A little further southward was another Lelegian settlement at Pedasos on the Satneios.[^[60]] From a passage in Homer it has been supposed that the Carians and Lelegians were distinct races, but in reality the Carians were a Lelegian tribe;[^[61]] that is Pelasgi, who like the Hellenes in Greece, gradually acquired power and dominion, and eclipsed their brethren. This they were enabled to do by applying themselves passionately to the use of arms, a circumstance which at a later period led them to make a traffic of their valour and hire their swords to the best bidder. In earlier and better times they achieved conquests for themselves, and rivalling the Phœnicians in maritime enterprise and success, reduced under their sway the greater number of the Ægæan islands,[^[62]] and even some portion of the Hellenic continent itself.[^[63]] Certain clans of this martial race sought an outlet for their restless daring by joining the Cilicians[^[64]] in their piratical enterprises, and probably it was in this character that they first obtained possession of some of the smaller isles. Positive historical testimony there seems to be none for fixing the Pelasgi in Cypros,[^[65]] though we cannot doubt that it was included in their dominions, from the ruins of Cyclopian fortresses still found there, and the Olympian Mount already mentioned. In Rhodes, however, and Samos antiquity speaks of their settlements;[^[66]] they, too, were the earliest inhabitants of Chios,[^[67]] whence they sent forth a colony to Lesbos,[^[68]] which received from them the name of Pelasgia. They expelled the Minyans from Lemnos,[^[69]] which afterwards, through fear of Darius, their king ceded to the Athenians,[^[70]] and held Imbros[^[71]] and Samothrace[^[72]] in the north; Scyros, too, was originally named Pelasgia.[^[73]] Andros was peopled by one[^[74]] of their colonies, and Delos, as we have already seen, held their bones until they were cast forth by the Athenians. But it is unnecessary to enumerate each separate point, since we know generally that all the Ægæan isles were anciently in their possession,[^[75]] and that even the great island of Crete formed, in remote ages, a portion of their empire. Here under the names of Curetes, Corybantes, Telchines and Dactyli,[^[76]] they flourished in the mythical times, and were the reputed preservers and nurses of the infant Zeus, a god pre-eminently Pelasgian, so that wherever his worship was found I regard it as a proof that the Pelasgi had settled there.

Passing thus from island to island in the very infancy of navigation, the Pelasgi appear by way of the Sporades and Cycladæ, to have migrated into Peloponnesos, first landing at Argos. Probably on their arrival they found there some few inhabitants who by the isthmus had entered and scattered themselves at leisure over the peninsula. But whether this was so or not, certain it is that the oldest legends of Hellenic mythology allude to the peopling of Argos by sea, representing Inachos, its first ruler, as a son of the ocean.[^[77]] From this chief, whether historical or fabulous, the principal river of Argos received its appellation, and members of his family bestowed their names on Argolis first, and afterwards on the whole of Peloponnesos, which from Apis was denominated Apia;[^[78]] from Pelasgos, Pelasgia;[^[79]] and from another prince so called, it received the name of Argos.[^[80]] In this division of Hellas, which the rays of poetry and mythology unite to render luminous, the Pelasgi[^[81]] seem early to have struck deep root, and made a rapid progress in civilisation. Here, accordingly, in historical times were found the most numerous monuments of their power and grandeur; and here, in the treasury of Atreus and the walls of Tiryns denominated Cyclopian, we still may contemplate proofs of their opulence and progress in the arts. Among them would appear to have existed a class or caste named Cyclops, addicted extremely to handicrafts, particularly building. These it was who erected the walls and citadel of Argos,[^[82]] on which they bestowed the name of Larissa, together with certain labyrinths, said to have existed in the neighbourhood of Nauplia. Mycenæ appears to have been the most ancient capital of the country, built while the site of Argos was yet a marsh,[^[83]] or perhaps under water; then came Tiryns, and lastly Argos. Other early seats of the Pelasgi were at Epidauros and Hermione.[^[84]]

But the province of Peloponnesos which the Pelasgi most delighted to consider their home, was the rough, wild, and elevated table land of Arcadia,[^[85]] resembling on a small scale their original seat in central Asia; belted round by mountains with many streams and rivers pouring down their sides: here long shut out from commerce with the rest of mankind they multiplied in ease and security, and became a great nation,[^[86]] who, to express the idea of their own extreme antiquity, professed themselves to be older than the moon.[^[87]] Having lost all tradition of their arrival in the country, they looked upon themselves as autochthons, and regarded their mountain-girt land as the great reservoir of Pelasgian population,[^[88]] whence its colonies like streams, flowed outwards, and peopled the rest of Hellas; and probably it was thence that the first emigrants descended into the valley of the Eurotas, spread themselves through Laconia, and found a mountain on which they bestowed the holy name of Olympos. In this province one of the most famous of the Pelasgian tribes, is by some traditions said to have had its origin; for Lelex,[^[89]] who gave his name to the Leleges, they fabled to have been an autochthon of Laconia, and down even to the times of Pausanias an heroum was shown at Sparta erected in honour of his name. Undoubtedly a mythical legend connected with this hero was deeply interwoven with the fabulous history of Laconia. His son Eurotas was the father of Sparta, wife of Lacedæmon, who gave his name to the country. He had two daughters, Amycla and Eurydice, the latter of whom became the wife of Acrisios.[^[90]] The Acarnanians, however, had among them a tradition which made Lelex an autochthon of Leucadia,[^[91]] and the people of Megara spoke of one Lelex[^[92]] who arrived in their country by sea from Egypt.

To proceed, however, with the traces of the Pelasgi in Peloponnesos. It has sometimes been supposed that no proof exists of their having held any part of this peninsula excepting Argos, Achaia and Arcadia;[^[93]] but erroneously, for we have seen the Leleges, a Pelasgian tribe, in Laconia; and we find a settlement of the Pelasgi in Messenia. Here also at Andania flourished the Pelasgian worship of the Dii Kabyri from Samothrace;[^[94]] colony of Leleges, under Pylos, son of Cleison, settled at Pylos on the Coryphasian promontory.[^[95]] The Caucons held Cyparissos;[^[96]] that is both in the interior of Messenia and along the sea coast we find settlements of the race which peopled the whole peninsula. Passing northward into Elis, we immediately on crossing the Neda find Caucons in the Lepreatis,[^[97]] where, probably, in proof that the tribe originated there, they showed in Strabo’s[^[98]] time the tomb of Caucon. They had likewise a river Caucon[^[99]] in the north of Elis, and in short the whole country from the Neda to the Larissos bore anciently the name of Cauconia.[^[100]] Some, however, maintain that they were found only at three points on the coast, that is, in the south of Triphylia,[^[101]] in the north near Dyme, and at Hollow Elis on the Peneios, which Aristotle considered their chief seat.[^[102]] Nevertheless Antimachos regarded the Epeians as Caucons,[^[103]] and since these inhabited the whole western coast from Messenia northward, we must consider Elis as the principal though not the original seat of this tribe; for we find them represented as issuing from Arcadia, and we have already shown that they were settled in Paphlagonia, and were denominated a Trojan tribe.

Turning our faces eastward from the promontory Araxos, we discover along the coast a chain of Pelasgian settlements founded by Ionians from Athens.[^[104]] To complete our list of proofs that there was no spot in all Hellas not possessed by the Pelasgi, we find a prince of that race, and named Pelasgos, receiving the goddess Demeter at Corinth in the remotest periods of the mythology.[^[105]]

Thus, then, we have traced this illustrious people under various names through every region of Greece, save Attica; and there also they were found, but whether they arrived by land or sea, I profess myself wholly unable to determine. A modern historian[^[106]] who experienced the same difficulty, observes, that the Ionians appear to have dropped from heaven into Attica. Unquestionably we do not know whence they came, and as their own legends represent them as autochthons[^[107]] we can expect no aid from tradition. The most probable supposition is, that when the migratory hordes were pushing southward from Thessaly, some clans, more fortunate than the rest, traversing the heights of Cithæron soon found themselves in possession of this unfertile but lovely land, covered in those ages with forests, diversified by hill and dale, and breathing perfume from every thicket. The succeeding tide of emigration breaking against the ridge of Cithæron seems to have turned westward and flowed into the Peloponnesos, leaving Attica unmolested. Some have regarded its own barrenness as the rampart which protected it from invasion. But why may we not suppose that the inhabitants finding themselves thriving and tranquil, resolved early to fight for their possessions, and hedged themselves from invasion by courage and arms? be this as it may, Attica was the first part of Hellas that enjoyed permanent exemption from war, so that the olive, its principal ornament and riches, became in all after ages the emblem of peace. Once settled in this country the Pelasgi were never driven thence,[^[108]] nor did they ever receive any considerable mixture of foreign settlers. Individuals from time to time were permitted to take up their abode among them; but, in this favoured spot, unalloyed by foreign mixture, the Pelasgic genius completely developed itself, and reached the highest pitch of civilisation known to the ancient world.

The earliest name bestowed on the Pelasgian tribe which held Attica was that of Cranaans;[^[109]] but whether they were so distinguished before their migration thither, or, which is more probable, derived their appellation from the rocky nature[^[110]] of their country, does not appear. Like most of the ancient nations, however, they frequently changed their name: at first perhaps simply Pelasgi, next Cranaans, then Cecropidæ and Ionians; afterwards, under the reign of Erechtheus they obtained from their patron divinity the name of Athenians, by which they have been known down to the present day. Among the fables of the mythology we discover traces of several attempts at disputing with the Aborigines the sovereignty of Attica. Thus Eumolpos, with a colony of Thracians, is by one tradition said to have obtained possession of the whole country,[^[111]] while another and more probable legend represents him as settling with a small band at Eleusis, where his family during the whole existence of Paganism exercised the office of priests of Demeter.[^[112]] The Cretans again under Minos sought to obtain a footing in the country; but the close of the tradition which speaks of this invasion shows that though disgraceful to Attica it was without any permanent result. Afterwards, when the unsettled Pelasgi had degenerated into pirates and freebooters, a powerful band of them appears to have found its way thither, and obtained a settlement in the immediate neighbourhood of the capital,[^[113]] on condition, apparently, of labouring at the erection of walls round the Acropolis. A portion of the fortifications is said to have been completed by these marauders, and to have obtained from them the name of the Pelasgian wall. But even these strangers were not suffered to remain; quarrels arising either about the land which the Pelasgi had obtained on the slopes of Hymettos, or on account of violence offered to certain Athenian maidens descending to the fountain of Callirrhoë for water. The emigrants were expelled and took refuge in Lemnos. In revenge for what they regarded as an injury, they carried away a number of Attic virgins who were celebrating the festival of Artemis at Brauron, which led in after times to the capture of Lemnos by Miltiades.

It seems to result from the above inquiry that every district in Hellas was originally peopled by the Pelasgi, which the poets in after ages expressed by saying that a king of that nation reigned over the whole country as far northward as the Strymon in Thrace.[^[114]]

We have shown that their dominions extended much further, and included not Thrace only, beyond the limits of Greece, but a great part likewise of Asia Minor and nearly every island in the Ægæan. But even these spacious limits were not wide enough to contain[contain] the whole Pelasgian population; for traversing the Adriatic, they penetrated into Etruria, and there and elsewhere in Italy, under the name of Tyrrhenians, erected Cyclopian cities, and deposited the germs of its future civilisation.[^[115]] Hence the great resemblance which historians and antiquaries have observed between the Etruscans and the Greeks. Both were offshoots from the great Pelasgic stem; though the simplicity of the original race in religion and manners maintained longer its ground in Italy than under the warmer skies of Greece. In these more western settlements, however, new tribes sprang up, who in glory eclipsed the mother race, which they learned to regard with contempt, so that they bestowed the name of Pelasgi on their slaves. A similar circumstance had previously occurred in Asia Minor, where the Carians reduced to servitude such of their brethren as in later times retained the name of Leleges.[^[116]]

If now we cast a rapid glance over the sciences and civilisation of the Pelasgi, we shall probably have acquired as complete an idea of that ancient people as existing monuments enable us to frame.[^[117]] Tradition attributed to them the invention of several arts of primary necessity, as those of building houses and manufacturing clothing, which they did from the skins of wild boars, the animals first slain by man for food. A relic of this primitive style of dress remained, we are told, to a very late age among the rustics of Phocis and Eubœa.[^[118]] Other traditions will have it that mankind fed on grass and herbs until the Pelasgi taught them the greater refinement of feeding upon acorns. But leaving these poetical fancies, we shall find in many genuine monuments and facts undisputed proofs of the power and knowledge of the Pelasgi. In the first place, they it was who bequeathed to their Hellenic descendants some knowledge, though imperfect and obscure, of the true God.[^[119]] In their minds the recognition of the unity of the Divine Being formed the basis of theology, and the philosophers of after ages who reasoned best and thought most correctly rose no higher on these points than their rude ancestors.

But the natural tendency of the human mind to error soon disturbed the simplicity of their faith; for as the tribes separated, each taking a different direction, they all in turns learned to consider the God as their patron, so that speedily there were as many gods as tribes, and polytheism was created. Thus the Pelasgi, who had at first like the polished nations of modern times no name for the gods, because they believed in but one, degenerated in the course of time, and invented that system of divinities and heroes which afterwards prevailed in Greece. They, too, it was, who in the developement of their superstition made the first steps towards the arts by setting up rude images of the powers they worshipped, and to them accordingly the introduction of the Hermæan statues at Athens is attributed.[^[120]] There was likewise in a temple of Demeter between mount Eboras and Taygetos, a wooden statue of Orpheus, supposed to be the workmanship of the Pelasgi.[^[121]] Evidently too, the worship of Demeter, and of all the rural gods grew up originally among them, as did likewise the adoration of supreme power and supreme wisdom in Zeus and Athena.[^[122]]

Usually the Pelasgi are considered as a much wandering people,[^[123]] though it would be more correct to represent them, like the Anglo-Saxon race in modern times, as the prolific parents of many settlements, spreading widely, but taking root wherever they spread. A proof of this still exists in the vast structures[^[124]] which they reared, whose ruins are yet found scattered through Asia, Greece, and Italy. These Cyclopian buildings, palaces, treasuries, fortresses, barrows, were not the works of nomadic hordes, but of a people attached to the soil and resolute in defending it. Navigation, likewise, they cultivated, and were among the earliest nations who possessed a power at sea,[^[125]] which led necessarily to the study of astronomy, together with the occult science of the stars.[^[126]] Of their progress in the more ordinary arts of utility we have very little knowledge, but we find in the Iliad a Pelasgian woman staining ivory to be used as ornaments of a war-horse;[^[127]] the invention of the shepherd’s crook was attributed to them; so likewise was the religious dance called Hyporchema;[^[128]] their proficiency in music is spoken of;[^[129]] and their pre-eminence in war was signified by representing them as inventors of the shield.[^[130]]

On the language of the Pelasgi various opinions are entertained. Some, relying on particular passages in ancient writers, have imagined that it was very different from the Greek,[^[131]] but although in support of such an opinion much ingenuity may be exhibited there are circumstances which compel us to reject it. The Athenians and Arcadians, for example, though of Pelasgian origin, spoke, and that from the remotest times, the same language with the rest of the Greeks; and though the Æolic dialect,[^[132]] the most ancient in Arcadia, or indeed in all Greece, was transformed to Latin in Italy, we are not on that account to infer that Latin bore a closer resemblance than the Greek to the mother tongue of both. The Pelasgian language indeed appears to have been the Hellenic in the earlier stages of its formation, just as the Pelasgi themselves were Greeks under another name and in a ruder state of civilisation. Whether they possessed any knowledge of written characters before[^[133]] the introduction of the Phœnician we have now no means of ascertaining, the passages usually brought forward in behalf of such an opinion being of small authority. To them, however, tradition attributes the introduction of letters into Latium,[^[134]] and there can be no doubt that the use of written characters was known in Greece before its inhabitants had ceased to be called Pelasgi.

I have now, I imagine, proved that the Pelasgi whencesoever they came, occupied, under one name or another, the whole continent of Greece and most of the islands. The Athenians, and consequently the Ionians, are on all hands acknowledged to have sprung from the Pelasgian stock. It only remains to be shown that the Dorians also traced their origin to this people, and we shall be satisfied that the whole of the illustrious nation, known to history under the name of Greeks, flowed from one and the same source. The Hellenes, of whom the Dorians were a tribe,[^[135]] occupied in later times the south of Thessaly, but at a much earlier period, along with the Selli,[^[136]] dwelt in the mountainous tracts about Dodona, where they were known under the name of Greeks or mountaineers,[^[137]] which was the original signification of the term. This district of Epeiros, it has been shown, was among the very earliest of the Pelasgian settlements, from which of itself it might be inferred that the Hellenes were Pelasgi. We are not left to rely in this matter on mere inference, since Herodotus states distinctly that they were a fragment of the Pelasgi.[^[138]]

It will be seen that I have hitherto made no allusion to the received fables about Egyptian and Phœnician colonies.[^[139]] Nevertheless it is quite possible that on many occasions certain fugitives, both from Phœnicia and Egypt, may have taken refuge in Greece, and been permitted, as in after ages, to settle there. These persons, coming from countries farther advanced in civilisation, would undoubtedly bring along with them a superior degree of knowledge in many useful arts, which, in gratitude for their hospitable reception, they would undoubtedly communicate to the inhabitants. But the most active agent in the diffusion of civilisation was probably commerce, which, by bringing neighbouring nations into close contact, by enlarging the sphere of their experience, and teaching them the advantages to be derived from peaceful intercourse, has in all ages softened and refined mankind. When the use of letters began first to prevail in the East is not known, but it was probably communicated early to the Pelasgi, along with the materials for writing; and whatever inventions were made on either side of the Mediterranean passed rapidly from shore to shore, so that the civilisation of the Egyptians, Phœnicians, and Greeks, advanced simultaneously, though the beginnings of improvement were undoubtedly more ancient on the banks of the Nile and among the maritime Arabs than in Hellas. The amount, however, of eastern influences I conceive was not great, and as to colonies, properly so called, with the exception of those already described from Asia Minor, I believe there never were any.

CHAPTER II.
CHARACTER OF THE GREEKS.

Having in the foregoing chapter endeavoured to ascertain by what races Greece was originally peopled, we shall next speak of the character and physical organization of its inhabitants. In doing this it may be useful to consider them in three different stages of their progress: first, in the heroic and poetical times; secondly, in the historical and flourishing ages of the Hellenic commonwealth; thirdly, in their corrupt and degenerate state under the dominion of the Macedonians and Romans.

The most distinguishing characteristic of the Hellenes, when poetry first places them before us, is a profound veneration for the divinity and every thing connected with the service of religion. By the force of imagination heaven and earth were brought near each other, not so much, indeed, by elevating the latter, as by bringing down the former within the sphere of humanity. Gods and men moved together over the earth, cooperated in bringing about events, keeping up a constant interchange of beneficence; the god aiding, the mortal repaying his aid with gratitude;[^[140]] the god guiding, the mortal submitting to be directed, until, sometimes, as in the case of Odysseus and Athena, the feeling of grace and favour on the one side, and of veneration and gratitude on the other, ripened into something like friendship and affection.

No man entered on any important enterprise without first consulting the gods, and throwing himself upon their protection, by sacrifice, divination, and prayer.[^[141]] They conceived, according to the best lights afforded them by their rude creed, that although means existed of warping the judgment, perverting the affections, and vitiating the decisions of their divinities, yet upon the whole and in the natural order of things they were just and beneficent, mercifully caring for the poor and the stranger, the guardians of friendship and hospitality, and avenging severely the offences committed against their laws. Habitually, when not provoked to vengeance by impiety or crimes, the gods they believed were not only beneficent towards mankind, but given among themselves to cheerfulness and mirth, loving music, songs, and laughter, feasting jovially together in a joy serene and almost imperturbable, save when interrupted by solicitude for some favoured mortal. Philosophy, in more intellectual times, condemned this rude conception of divine things; but men’s ideas, like their offerings, belong to the state of society in which they live, and the Greeks of the heroic ages unquestionably attributed to their gods the qualities most in esteem among themselves.

Next to religion the most prominent feeling in the mind of the early Greeks was filial piety.[^[142]] Nowhere among men were parents held in higher honour. The reverence paid to them partook largely of the religious sentiment. Regarded as the instruments by which God had communicated the mysterious and sacred gift of life, they were supposed by their children to be for ever invested with a high degree of sanctity as ministers and representatives of the Creator. Hence the anxiety experienced to obtain a father’s blessing and the indescribable dread of his curse. A peculiar set of divinities, the terrible Erinnyes, all but implacable and unsparing, were entrusted with the guardianship of a parent’s rights, and indescribable were the pangs and anguish supposed to seize upon transgressors. These were the powers who tracked about the matricides Orestes and Alcmæon, scaring them with spectral terrors and filling their palaces with the alarms and agonies of Tartaros. On the other hand, nothing can be more beautiful than the pictures of filial piety exhibited by the nobler characters of heroic times. The examples are innumerable, but none is so striking or complete as that of Achilles towards his father Peleus. Fierce, vehement, stern in the ordinary relations of life, towards his aged father he is gentle as a child. His heart yearns to him with a strength of feeling incomprehensible to a meaner nature. He submits to his sway and authority not from any apprehension of his power, not even from the fear of offending him, but from the fulness of his love, from the natural excellence and purity of his heart. He would erect his valour and the might of his arm into a rampart round the old man, to protect him from injury and insult; and even in the cold region of shadows beyond the grave this feeling is represented as still alive, so that in death, as in life, the uppermost anxiety of the hero’s soul is for the happiness of his father. Even in the government of his impetuous passions during his mortal career, in the choice of the object of his love, Achilles expresses a desire to render his feelings subordinate to those of his parent, thus verging on the utmost limits of self-denial and self-control conceivable in a state of nature. Homer understood his countrymen well when he gave these qualities to his hero. Without them, he knew that no degree of courage or wisdom would have sufficed to render him popular, and, therefore, we find him not only pre-eminent for his piety towards the gods, but at the same time the most affectionate and dutiful of sons, the warmest, most disinterested, and unchangeable of friends.

And this leads us to consider another remarkable feature of the Greek character,—its peculiar aptitude for friendship. No country’s history and traditions abound with so many examples of this virtue as those of Greece. In truth, it was there regarded as the most unequivocal mark of an heroic and generous nature, being wholly inconsistent with anything base, sordid, or ignoble, and flourishing only in company with virtues rarest and most difficult of acquisition. Poetry, no doubt, has clad the friendship of heroic times with a splendour scarcely belonging to real life, but the experience of history warrants us in making but slight deductions. Nature in those ages appeared to delight in producing men in pairs, each suited to be the ornament and solace of the other, possessing different qualities, imperfect when apart, but complete, united. Men thus constituted were a sort of moral twins, an extension, if we may so speak, of unity, the same yet different, bringing two souls under the yoke of one will, desiring the same, hating the same, possessing the same, valuing life and the gifts of life only as they were shared in common, seeking adventures, facing dangers together, conforming their thoughts, opinions, feelings, each to the other, having no distinct interest, no distinct hope, but engrafting two lives on the chances of one man’s fortune, and both perishing by the same blow.

This feeling has by some been supposed to have owed its strength, in part at least, to the degraded position of women in society; a subject on which I shall have more to say hereafter, but may here remark that such an opinion is wholly incompatible with an impartial interpretation of the Homeric poems and the older traditions of Greece. Throughout fabulous times women are the prime movers in all great events; and the respect which as mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters they received, though expressed in uncourtly language, was perhaps as great as has ever been paid them in any age or country. Every distinguished woman in Homer is the centre of a circle of tender and touching associations. We behold them beloved by their relatives, honoured by their dependants, enjoying every decent freedom, every becoming pleasure, with all the influence and authority appertaining to their sex. Thus Helen, both before and after her fall, is entire mistress of her house, and treated with all possible deference and delicacy: so Hecuba, Andromache, Penelope, Arete, Nausicaa, and Iphigeneia in their respective positions, are held in the highest esteem, and command as great a share of love from those whose duty it was to love and honour them, as any other women in history or fiction. Nor were due respect and tenderness confined to the high and the noble; for innumerable proofs occur in Homer that even among the humblest ranks, that delicate self-respect which is shown by respect to our other self, and may be regarded as the pivot of civilisation, was already in that age very generally diffused.

But if the Greeks of heroic times possessed the good qualities we have attributed to them, they were still more, perhaps, distinguished for others, which often obliterated the footsteps of their virtues, and appeared to be the guiding principles of their lives. Chief among these was their passion for war and violence,[^[143]] which engaged them in everlasting struggles with their neighbours, developed overmuch their fierce and destructive qualities, and threw into comparative shade such of their propensities as were gentler and more humane. War by land, piracy by sea, filled the whole country with incessant alarms. Commerce was checked and confined within very narrow channels, both travelling and navigation being exceedingly unsafe, while bands of marauders traversed land and sea in quest of rapine and plunder. In some states no other mode was known of arriving at opulence, and the humbler classes of society were wholly subsisted by it.[^[144]] The laws of war, too, were proportionably savage. It was customary either to give no quarter, or to devote all prisoners taken to servitude; and, accordingly, every petty state was filled with unfortunate captives, many of them of illustrious birth and qualities, reduced to the humblest conditions, being compelled to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow. In peace, too, and in their own homes their warlike habits led frequently to the perpetration of violence; their passions being strong and unbridled they resented insults on the spot, and numerous homicides were, in consequence, found flying from the country whose infant institutions their passions had sought to overthrow.

But in all stages of society it has been ordained by Providence that out of the wickedness of man some compensating good shall flow: thus, from the dangers and difficulties surrounding the stranger the virtue of hospitality[^[145]] sprang up in generous minds. From the distress and misery of the passionate or accidental slayer of man arose the merciful rites of expiation, and all the friendly ties which subsisted between the purifier and the purified. Wanderers driven from their home often found a better in a foreign land; and thus even the transgressions and misfortunes of men, by breaking down the narrow enclosures of families and clans, and connecting persons of distant tribes together by benefits and gratitude, hastened the progress of refinement and paved the way for the greatness and glory of succeeding ages.

It will, from what has been said, be seen that among the elements of the Greek character passion greatly predominated; but, even from the earliest times, the existence was apparent of other powerful principles, by the influence of which the nation was led to emerge rapidly from its period of barbarism. These were an innate love of magnificence, and a striking inclination towards all social enjoyments; the former leading to the cultivation of commerce and industry, the latter communicating an extraordinary impetus to the natural desire common to mankind for companionship and society. But in developing these principles nature pursued in Greece a peculiar route. Instead of establishing a common centre, towards which the energies of the whole nation might tend, society was broken up into numerous parts, each forming, when considered separately, a whole, but united with its neighbours by identity of origin, language, religion, and national character.

Philosophers usually seek in geographical position a key to the fact of the formation of so many separate states as the Hellenic population was divided into; but the cause was probably of a different kind. Among every other people, a difficulty has always been experienced in discovering men capable of conducting public affairs; and, when any such have arisen, they have easily subdued to their will their less intellectual and, consequently, less ambitious neighbours. Among the Greeks the case was wholly different: every province, every district, nay, every town and village abounded with men endowed with the ability and passion for governing. These feelings begot the aversion to submit to the government of others; this aversion engendered strife; and it was only the accident of a numerical superiority existing in one division of the country, or of a statesman of extraordinary genius springing up, that enabled one village to subdue its neighbours for a few miles around, and thus establish a small political community.

History rarely penetrates back so far as the period in which this state of things existed. But we have an example in the annals of Attica, where the twelve small municipal states, if one may so speak, were, partly by persuasion, partly by force, brought under the authority of one city, possessing the advantages of a superior position and wiser and more enterprising leaders.

These diminutive polities once formed, many causes concurred to preserve their integrity, of which the most obvious and powerful was the pride of race, and, next to this, certain religious feelings and peculiarities, which stationed gods along the frontier line of states, and rendered it impious for the worshippers of other divinities to invade or dispossess them of their lands. Communities having at first been thus isolated, numerous circumstances arose to make eternal the separation. The ready invention of the people gave to each state its heroes and heroic traditions, based, perhaps, on the exploits of border warfare, in which the ancestors of one community had suffered or inflicted injuries on the ancestors of another. Poets sprang up who celebrated these deeds in song, and every assembly, every festival, every merry-making resounded with the commemoration of deeds as galling to one people as they were glorious to the other. These prejudices, this cantonal patriotism, this tribual vanity, if I may coin a new word to express a new idea, constituted a far more impassable barrier between the diminutive states of Greece, than either mountains or rivers; though, in process of time, some few cases occurred in which very small communities were immersed and lost in greater ones. The heroism, however, with which the smallest commonwealth struggled to preserve its separate existence, the watchful jealousy, the undying solicitude, the fierce and sanguinary valour by which it hedged round its independence, the indescribable agonies of political extinction, may be seen in the examples of Ægina, Megara, Platæa, and Messenia.

In fact the most remarkable peculiarity in the Greek character was a certain centrifugal force, or abhorrence of centralisation, which presented insurmountable obstacles to the union of the whole Hellenic nation under one head. The inhabitants of ancient Italy exhibited on this point an entirely dissimilar character. Though differing from each other widely in manners, customs and laws, they still possessed so much of affinity as enabled them successively to unite themselves with Rome, and melt into one great people. The causes lay in their moral and intellectual character: possessing little genius or imagination, but much good sense, they experienced less keenly the misery of inferiority, the anguish of defeat, the tortures of submission, and calculated more coolly the advantages of protection and tranquillity, and all the other benefits of living under a strong government. Where the masses are but slightly impregnated with the fire of genius they are naturally disposed to amalgamation, and form a vast body necessarily subjected to one head. But where a nation is everywhere pervaded and quickened by genius, where imagination is an universal attribute, where to soar is as natural as to breathe, where the principal enjoyment of life is the exercise of power, where men hunger and thirst more for renown than for their daily bread, where life itself without these imaginary delights is insipid and despicable, no force, while the vigour of the national character continues unbroken, can erect a central government, or achieve extensive conquests, that is, subject one part of the nation to the sway of the other. And perhaps it may be found when we shall farther have perfected the science of government, that in politics as in physics the largest bodies are not the most valuable, or the most difficult to be shattered. The diamond resists when the largest rock yields. The true tendency of civilisation, therefore, is to reduce unwieldy empires into compact bodies, which the light of education can penetrate and render luminous. Vast empires are but opaque masses of ignorance.

From precisely the same causes arose the peculiar notions of the Greeks on the subject of government; that is, the citizens of each state applied to one another the principle which regulated the conduct of communities. Every man experienced an aversion to yield obedience to his neighbour, every man was ambitious to rule; but, as this was impossible, it became necessary to invent some means by which public business could be carried on without offering too much violence to the national character. Hence the origin of republicanism and the establishment of commonwealths, in which the sovereignty was acknowledged to reside in the body of the people, and where such of the citizens as by abilities, rank, friends, were qualified, might rule in vicarious succession.

But the various families of the Hellenes were not all equally endowed with the energy and intellect which belonged to their race; some possessed more of these qualities, others less, and there were besides in operation numerous peculiar and local causes which modified the forms of polity adopted by the various states of Greece. The heavier, the colder, the more inert naturally chose that form of government which would least tax their mental faculties, and most completely relieve them from the care of public affairs, in order the more sedulously to attend to their own; while the fierier, the busier, more active and buoyant preferred that political constitution which would afford their energetic natures most employment, and supply a legitimate outlet for the ardour and impetuosity of their temperament. Thus, in certain communities there was a leaning towards monarchy, in others towards oligarchy; in a third class towards aristocracy; while Athens and some few smaller states preferred the stir, bustle, and incessant animation of democracy.

Again these institutions, springing at first out of national idiosyncrasies, became in their turn among the most active causes which impressed the stamp of individuality on the population of each separate state: for the principle which animates a form of government is not a barren principle, but impregnates, leavens, and vivifies the community subjected to its influence, and produces an offspring analogous to the source from which it sprang. Thus, in monarchies the summits of a nation are rich with verdure and glorious with light; in aristocracies a broad table-land is fertilized and rendered beautiful; while in commonwealths, properly so called, the whole surface of society unrolls itself like a vast plain to the sun, and receives the light and comfort, and invigorating influence of its beams:—and all these various modifications of civil polity were at different times and in different parts of the country beheld in Greece, where they produced their natural fruits.

Among the principal results of the causes we have enumerated were a high intellectual cultivation, the profoundest study of philosophy, the most ardent pursuit of literature, a matchless taste for the beautiful in nature and in art, an irrepressible enthusiasm in the search after knowledge of every kind, and, joined with these, as their cause sometimes, and sometimes as their consequence, an invincible and limitless craving after fame. And these characteristic qualities of the people exhibited themselves in various ways. Sometimes, as in Thessaly, men sought to distinguish themselves by their wealth and the pomp by which they were surrounded:—sometimes their ruling passion urged them to pluck, amidst blood and slaughter, the laurels of war, as in Crete and Sparta, where military discipline was carried to its utmost perfection, where men lived perpetually encamped around their domestic hearths, cultivated the habits, preferences, tastes, and feelings of soldiers, and looked upon dominion as the supreme good:—sometimes religion, with its rites and pomp and sacrifices, absorbed a whole people, as in Elis, where the worship of supreme Zeus and the celebration of sacred games conferred a sanctity upon the land and people which all men of Hellenic blood respected:—elsewhere mountaineers,[^[146]] of indomitable valour, hired out their swords to the best bidder, and became, as it were, the journeymen of war:—elegant pleasures in many cities, and commerce and magnificence, occupied and depraved the whole community; while others,[^[147]] of grosser minds and more sordid propensities, passed their whole lives in indolent gluttony round the festive board, amid crowds of singers, flute-players, and dancers; or else, like the Delphians, were ever seen hovering amid the smoke of the altars, whetting their sacrificial knives or feasting on the savoury victims; and yet the triumphs of the Thebans proved that even the lowest of the Greeks, when circumstances led them to cultivate the arts of war, were capable of planning and executing great designs, and acquiring lasting celebrity. The arts, however, by which the Greeks rose to greatness,[^[148]] and became the instructors and everlasting benefactors of mankind, flourished chiefly at Athens, and in the numerous colonies which she planted in various parts of Asia and the islands. To men of Ionian race we owe, in fact, the invention and most successful culture of poetry and philosophy, and those plastic and mimetic arts which added to the world of realities another world more beautiful still. If the Greeks borrowed, as no doubt they did, certain varieties and forms of art and learning from the barbarians, they immediately so refined and improved them, that the original inventors would no longer have recognised the works of their own hands. The glory of giving birth to several of the arts and sciences belongs to them: they were the inventors of the art of war; among them alone, in the ancient world, painting and sculpture assumed their proper dignity; and in politics and statesmanship, and that art of arts, philosophy, they led the way, and taught mankind the steps by which to arrive at perfection.

Greece, by the means we have described, was gradually reclaimed from the state of nature, covered with beautiful cities, harbours, docks, temples, palaces adorned with infinite variety of works of art, with sculpture in ivory and gold, with paintings, gems, and vases, which converted her principal cities into so many museums. Her plains, her dells, her mountain recesses were studded with sanctuaries and sacred groves, conferring the external beauty of religion on the whole face of the country. Public roads, branching from numerous capital cities, traversed the land in every direction; bridges spanned her rivers, agriculture covered her hills and plains with harvests, the vine hung in festoons from tree to tree, the foliage of the olive clothed the mountain sides, and a belt of beautiful gardens surrounded every city, town, and village.

The primary cause of all this amazing activity has, by philosophers, been sought for in various circumstances of the condition of the Greeks, in the form of their institutions, in the rivalry of so many small communities, in the fact of their being inventors, and the consequent freshness of their pursuits. But although all these circumstances and many others contributed, as we have shown, to expedite the progress of the Greeks in civilisation, they were none of them the fountain head, which lies far beyond our ken. It were in fact as easy to tell why one star differs from another star in glory, as why one nation or one man rises in intellect above his fellows. But we are supplied with a link in the chain which connects the above effects with their cause, by the physical organisation of the Greeks, who possessed the most perfect forms in which humanity ever appeared. Their frame exhibiting all the beauty of which the human body is susceptible, uniting strength with lightness, dignity and elegance with activity, the utmost robustness of health with extreme delicacy of contour, the muscles developed by exercise, and developed over the whole structure alike, suggested the idea of power and indefatigable energy; the stature, generally above the middle size, the free and unembarrassed gait, the features[^[149]] full of beauty, the expression replete with intellect, and the eye flashing with a consciousness of independence:—all these united conferred upon the form of the Greek an elevation, a grandeur, a majesty which we still contemplate with admiration in their sculpture, and denominate the ideal. Above all things, the form of the Grecian head was most exquisite, with its smooth, expansive, almost perpendicular forehead and majestic outline, describing a perfect oval. Generally the complexion was of a clear olive, the hair and eyes black, the temperament inclined to melancholy, though numerous instances occurred of sanguine fair persons with light eyes and chesnut or auburn hair, which the youth wore, as now, in a profusion of ringlets falling to the shoulders. Instances likewise occurred among the Greeks of individuals, who, like our own Chatterton, had eyes of different colours. Thus the poet Thamyris[^[150]] is said to have had one eye grey, the other black. Nay, this peculiarity was even remarked among the inferior animals, more particularly the horses.[^[151]]

The characteristic beauty of the nation displayed itself in every stage of life, only assuming new phases in its progress from the beauty of infancy to the beauty of old age, inspiring the mingled feelings of love and admiration; and notwithstanding the effects of time, and inter-marriage with barbarous races, the same is the case still. For nowhere in Europe do we meet with infants so lovely, with youths so soft, so virginal, so beautiful in their incipient manliness, with old men so grave, stately, and with countenances so magnificent, as among the living descendants of the Hellenes, whose destiny may yet be, one day, as enviable as their forms.

To push our enquiry one step further; it may be questioned, whether the glorious organisation we have been describing was not itself an effect of air, climate, and soil.[^[152]] Certain at any rate it is, that the atmosphere of Greece is clearer, purer, more buoyant and elastic, than that of any other country in our hemisphere. At night, particularly, there is a transparency in the air, which appears to impart additional lustre and magnitude to the stars and moon. Its mountain tops, the intervening space being, as it were, removed, seem to mingle with the constellations which cluster in brightness on the edge of the horizon.

A principal cause of this clearness and pellucidness is the great prevalence of the north wind,[^[153]] which brings with it few or no vapours, but gathers together the clouds in heaps and rolls them from the land towards the Mediterranean. The reason why this wind so often prevails may be discovered in the geographical configuration of the country, which is not, like Italy, divided from the rest of the continent by a range of Alps that might have screened it from the colder blasts, but lies open like an elevated threshing-floor, to be purged and winnowed on all sides by the winds, which in many parts are so violent that no tree can attain to any great height, while the stunted woods throw all their branches in one direction, and the vines and other climbing shrubs are laid prostrate along the rocks. These winds, however, prevail not constantly, but the southern and western breezes, blowing at intervals, bring along with them the warm atmosphere of Syria or Egypt, or the cooling freshness of the ocean. Another cause, which greatly tends to promote the purity of the air, is the lightness, friability, and dryness of the soil, which, distributed for the most part in thin layers over ledges of rocks, permits no stagnation of moisture, but enables the rain that falls to trickle through, collect in rills and brooks, and find its way rapidly to the sea. The plains and irregular valleys, which form an exception to this rule, are not numerous enough, or of sufficient magnitude to affect the general proposition. There appear, moreover, to be many peculiar properties and virtues in the soil itself, causing all fruits transplanted thither to attain to speedy ripeness and superior flavour, while odoriferous plants and flowers, as the jasmine, the wild thyme, and the rose exhale sweeter and more delicious fragrance. This is more particularly the case in Attica, which accordingly produced in antiquity, where due care was bestowed on gardening and agriculture, the finest fruits and sweetest honey in the world.[^[154]]

The same qualities in soil and climate which affect vegetation, likewise powerfully influence the character and temperament of men and animals. It is, for example, well known in the Levant, that the Bedouins inhabiting Arabia Proper and the Eastern Desert degenerate both in character and physical organisation when transplanted to the Libyan wastes on the western banks of the Nile. But if particular soil and situation engender particular diseases; if the air of fens and marshes blunt the senses and paralyse, to a certain degree, the intellectual faculties, the converse of the proposition must also hold good; so that it is conceivable that the light soil and pure air of Greece may have produced corresponding effects on the bodies and minds of its inhabitants. The experiment, in fact, is made daily; for strangers arriving there with the germs of disease in their constitution, are, in most cases, speedily destroyed by the force of the climate; while the healthy and vigorous acquire the vivacity, the cheerfulness, the nervous and impetuous energy of the natives themselves, and, like them, extend the term of life to its utmost span. Greece, indeed, has always been the habitation of longevity; its philosophers in antiquity,—its monks, anchorites, and rural population in modern times, furnishing, perhaps, more examples of extreme old age than could be found on the same extent of territory in any other part of the globe.

Now this excess of vitality, this superabundance of the principle of life, which constitutes what we intend by physical or moral energy, almost inevitably produces, among an ill-governed, ill-educated people, a large harvest of crime, and, accordingly, the modern Greeks have often been distinguished for audacious villany; the intrepid vigour of their character, controlled neither by religion nor philosophy, easily breaking through the restraints of tyranny and unjust laws in the chase after power or excitement. That Frenchman spoke more truly than he thought, who said the Greeks were still the same “canaille” as in the days of Themistocles: for, give them the same laws, the same education, the same incentives to virtue and to heroism, and they will probably be again as virtuous, as wise, and as heroic as their illustrious ancestors. I judge in this way partly from my own experience, for I have seldom become acquainted with a Greek,—and I have known many,—who has not improved upon acquaintance, won my esteem, and, in most cases, my affection, and impressed me with the firm belief that there is no nation in the varied population of Europe which, if ruled with wisdom and justice, would exhibit loftier or more exalted qualities. In these views I am happy to be borne out by the testimony of Monsieur Frederic Thiersch, whose facilities for studying the modern Greek have been far more ample than mine, and whose opinions are marked by the cautious acuteness of the statesman with the depth and originality of the philosopher.

In alluding to the causes which pervert the feelings and misdirect the energies of the existing race, I have touched also at the great source of crime among their ancestors,—I mean, defective laws and institutions; for although the Greek character was, in force and excellence, all that I have said, and more, it, nevertheless, contained other elements than those I have described, which it now becomes my duty to speak of. From a very early period there existed in Greece two political parties, variously denominated in various states, but upholding,—the one, the doctrine that the many ought to be subjected to the few; the other, that the few ought to be subjected to the many: in other words, the oligarchical and democratical parties. From the struggles of these two factions the internal history of Greece takes its form and colour, as to them may be traced most of the fearful atrocities, in the shape of conspiracies, massacres, revolutions, which, instructing while they shock us, stain the Greek character with indelible blots.[^[155]] Ambitious men are nowhere scrupulous. To enjoy the delight imparted by the exercise of power, individuals have in all ages stifled the dictates of conscience; and where, as in modern Italy and in ancient Greece, numerous small states border upon each other, sufficiently powerful to dream of conquest though too weak to achieve it, the number of the ambitious is of necessity greatly multiplied. In proportion, however, to the thirst of power in one class was the love of freedom and independence in the other, so that the process of encroachment and resistance, of tyranny and rebellion, of usurpation and punishment, was carried on perpetually,—the oligarchy now predominating, and cutting off or sending into exile the popular leaders, while the democratic party, triumphing in its turn, inflicted similar sufferings on its enemies. By degrees, moreover, there sprang up two renowned states to represent these opposite principles, and the contests carried on by them assumed consequently many characteristics of civil war,—its obstinacy, its bitterness, its revenge.

In these struggles seas of blood were shed, and crimes of the darkest dye perpetrated. Cities, once illustrious and opulent, were razed to the ground; whole populations put to the sword or reduced to servitude; fertile plains rendered barren; men most renowned for capacity and virtue made a prey to treachery or the basest envy; the morals of great states corrupted, their glory eclipsed, their power undermined, and a way paved for the inroads of barbarian conquerors who ultimately put a period to the grandeur of the Hellenes.

Examples without number might be collected of these horrors. It will be sufficient to advert briefly to a few, more to remind than to inform the reader. In the troubles of Corcyra[^[156]] the nobles and the commons alternately triumphing over each other, carried on with the utmost ruthlessness the work of extermination with abundant baseness and perfidy, some portion of which attached to the Athenian generals: the wrongs and sufferings inflicted by the Spartans on the brave but unfortunate inhabitants of Messenia, with the annual butchery of the Helots, the treacherous withdrawal of suppliants from sanctuary, and their subsequent slaughter,[^[157]] the extermination of the people of Hysia,[^[158]] the precipitating of neutral merchants into pits,[^[159]] the betrayal of the cities of Chalcidice and the islands, the massacre in cold blood of the Platæans, of four thousand Athenians in the Hellespont,[^[160]] the reduction of innumerable cities to servitude: by the Athenians, the extermination of the people of Melos,[^[161]] the slaughter of a thousand Mitylenians, the cruelties at Skione, Ægina, and Cythera;[^[162]] but beyond these, and beyond all, the fearful excesses of civil strife at Miletos where the common people called Gergithes having risen in rebellion against the nobles and defeated them in battle, took their children and cast them into the cattle stalls where they were crushed and trampled to death by the infuriated oxen; but the nobles renewing the contest and obtaining ultimately the victory, seized upon their enemies,—men, women, children, and covered them with pitch, to which setting fire they burnt them alive.[^[163]]

From these glimpses of guilt and suffering, we may learn to what extremes the Greek was sometimes hurried by passion and the thirst of power. But propensities so wolfish were not predominant in his nature.[^[164]] On the contrary, in private life, even the Spartans and the Dorians generally put off their cruel and severe habits, and relaxed on all proper occasions into joviality and mirth. In their social intercourse, in fact, few nations have been more cheerful or addicted to jokes and pleasantry than the Greeks, and above all the Athenians, whose hours of leisure were one continued round of gossip, sport, and laughter.[^[165]] Never in any city were news-mongers, or even news-forgers, so numerous. In the mouth of young and old no question was so frequent as, “What is the news?” These were the sounds that circulated from rank to rank in the assembly of the people before the orators began their harangues, that were bandied[bandied] to and fro in the Agora, that filled by their incessant repetition the shops of barbers and perfumers.[^[166]] Akin to this itching ear was the passion for show and magnificence, every man, from highest to lowest, affecting as far as possible spacious dwellings, superb furniture and costly apparel. Even the bravest of the brave, the heroes of Marathon, were petits-maîtres[maîtres] at their toilette, and went forth to the field in purple cloaks, their hair curled, adorned with golden ornaments, and perfumed with essences. The study of philosophy itself failed in most cases to subdue this ostentatious spirit. Plato loved rich carpets and splendid raiment. Even Aristotle was an exquisite, and Æschines an acknowledged coxcomb.

From several of these weaknesses the Spartans were free. They cared little for news, still less for dress, and less still for cleanliness; so that their beautiful long hair and waving beards swarmed with those autochthonal beasts, for the expulsion of which there was no law in Sparta. Though neither a knowing nor cleanly race, however, their wit was bright and piercing. No people uttered pithier or finer sayings, and their taste both in music and poetry was cultivated and refined. Probably, therefore, the dining halls and gymnasia and public walks of Sparta were enlivened by as much mirth as those of any other Grecian city, where usually cheerfulness was so prevalent, that “to be as merry as a Greek,” has become a proverb in all countries.

On the third period of the Greek character it is unnecessary to speak at any length. Most of their good qualities having departed with their freedom they degenerated into a dissembling, hypocritical, fawning and double-dealing race, with little or no respect for truth, without patriotism, and without genuine valour. The literature, painting, and sculpture, to which in their period of degradation they gave birth, bore evident marks of their degeneracy, and tended by the corruption they diffused to avenge them on their conquerors the Romans; whose minds and morals they vitiated, and whose career of freedom and glory they cut short. Through their vices, however, the fame of their more noble and virtuous ancestors has greatly suffered, for the Romans contemplating the Greeks they saw before them, and implanting their opinion throughout the whole civilised world, their false and unjust views have been bequeathed to posterity; for it is still in a great measure through the Romans that people study the Greeks.

[1]. Plutarch, Life of Themistocles, in Langhorne’s plain and vigorous translation.

[2]. Mitford, History of Greece, iii. 53.

[3]. Paus. v. 21. 10. Palm. Desc. Gr. Ant. p. 32. Exercit. p. 397.

[4]. Il. β. 190. Strab. ix. 5. 297. Tauchnitz. with the authorities quoted by Palmerius, Græc. Ant. i. 3.

[5]. Fisch. ad Theoph. Char. p. 5. L. Bos. Ant. Gr. Zeun. i. 1.

[6]. Hooker, Ecc. Pol. i. p. 95.

[7]. Paus. viii. 1. 6; ii. 14. 4; 22. 1. Herod, ii. 56. Æsch. Prom. 859. Supp. 248. Nieb. Hist. of Rome, i. 24. Apollod. ii. 1. Serv. ad Æn. i. 628; ii. 83. Sch. Apol. Rhod. i. 580. Tzetz. ad Lyc. 177. 481. Natal. Com. p. 96. and conf. Palm. Græc. Ant. p. 41. sqq. Exercit. p. 527. with Buttm. Lexil. p. 155.

[8]. Philochor. Siebel. p. 14.

[9]. Marsh. Chron. Sec. ix. p. 130.

[10]. Strab. viii. 3. p. 127.

[11]. Apollod. i. 9. 18. The mythology describes the Pelasgi as driven out of Thessaly by the Æolians, and, under the guidance of Cyzicos, taking possession of the peninsula of that name previous to the Argonautic expedition. They fought with the Argonauts, and were afterwards expelled by the Tyrrhenians, who in their turn were driven out by the Milesians. Phot. Bib. p. 139. a. 25. Bekk.

[12]. Il. β 857.

[13]. Payne Knight, on the Worship of Priapus, p. 147.

[14]. Λέλεγας γάρ φασι πρότερον αὐτοὺς προσαγωρευομένους, διὰ τὸ ἀποκεντῆσαι τοὺς ἵππους προσαγορευθῆναι Ἱπποκενταύρους. Sch. Pind. Pyth. ii. 78. Cf. Schœll. Hist. de la Lit. Grecq. i. 4. seq.

[15]. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 1024. Cf. Winkel. Hist. de l’Art. i. 317.

[16]. Strab. x. 3. p. 349.

[17]. Strab. x. 3. p. 349. Sch. Pind. Olymp. iii. 19. Pliny, iv. 2. Eustath. ad Il. β. 637. Certain ancient writers maintained that the Ætolians were called Curetes by Homer; and at a still earlier period Hyantes, and the country Hyantis.—Steph. Byzant. v. Αἰτωλ[Αἰτωλ]. p. 71. a. Palm. G. Ant. p. 426.—Acarnania itself was formerly called Curetis.—Demet. ap. Steph. v. Ἀθῆν. p. 45. a. Hard. ad Plin. iv. 2. p. 7.

[18]. Strab. vii. 7. p. 124. seq. Hesiod. Frag. 54. et 124. Gœttl.—A second Dodona is supposed to have existed in Thessaly.—See Thirl. Hist. of Greece, i. 36.—Cf. Buttm. Diss. de orac. Dodon. Orat. Att. vii. 133. sqq.

[19]. Il. π. 233.

[20]. Herod. ii. 51.

[21]. Justin. vii. 1. Thucyd. ii. 99.

[22]. Müller, Dor. i. 2.

[23]. Herod, i. 57.—On the situation of this city see Poppo, Proleg. ad Thucyd. ii. p. 383.

[24]. Justin, vii. 1. Æsch. Supp. p. 261. Cf. Thucyd. iv. 109.

[25]. Diod. v. p. 396. Wesseling.

[26]. Steph. Byz. v. Χαονία, p. 753. g.

[27]. Hermann, however, (Polit. Ant. p. 14,) imagines that the Caucons, Leleges, &c. were independent races, though less civilised and illustrious than the Pelasgi.

[28]. Plin. iv. 1.

[29]. Schol. ad Aristoph. Eq. 78.

[30]. Aristot. Meteorol. i. 14. p. 39.—Il. π. 234. seq.

[31]. Steph. Byz. v. Ἔφυρα, p. 367. c. Strab. vii. 7 p. 119. See also Müll. Dor. i. 6. Plut. Pyrrh. 1.—See the authorities collected by Niebuhr, i. 26.

[32]. Dolops was the son of Hermes, and dying in the city of Magnesia in Thessaly, had there a tomb erected by the sea-shore. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 587. 558.

[33]. Palmer. Exercit. p. 527.—Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 500.—Dion. Hal. i. 3. 1.

[34]. Athen. xiv. 45.

[35]. Serv. ad. Æn. viii. 725.

[36]. Paus. iv. 36. 1. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. ii. 1239.

[37]. Pliny, iv. 14.—Even Phthiotis itself, one of the earliest cradles of the Hellenes, is recorded to have been a Pelasgian settlement. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 14.—Cf. ad. i. 40. 580.

[38]. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 26.; i. 906. 580.

[39]. Steph. Byzant. v. Λάρισσ. p. 511. b, c, d. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 40.

[40]. That the Dryopes were Pelasgi, appears from this:—they received their national appellation from Dryops, son of Lycaon, (Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 1218,) who was himself the son of Pelasgos.—Suid. v. Λυκ. Cf. Etym. Mag. 154, 7. 288, 32. Paus. viii. 2. 1.

[41]. Just. xiii. 4.—The Epicnemidian Locrians were anciently called Leleges, and by them the channel of the Cephissos was opened to the sea.—Pliny, iv. 12. Solin. vii. p. 55. Bipont. Hesiod. Frag. 25. Gœttl. Strab. vii. 7. p. 115; ix. 1. p. 248. Scymn. Chius, p. 24.—Phot. Bib. 321. b.

[42]. Mnaseas of Patræ ap. Sch. Pind. Pyth. iv. 104.—Dion. Hal. (Ant. Rom. i. 31) is one of those writers who considers the Pelasgi miserable because they were wanderers. Upon this notion Palmerius remarks judiciously: “Sed si tales migrationes miseræ sunt, miserrimi olim Galli majores nostri, qui usque in Asiam, post multas errores, armis victricibus penetrâsse historiæ omnes testantur, et hoc seculo miserrimi Tartari et Arabes, qui Nomadice vivunt, et sedes identidem mutantes, non se miseros existimant, et id genus vitæ Attalicis conditionibus mutare recusarent.”—Græc. Antiq. p. 60.

[43]. According to the reading of Callisthenes, Homer himself fixes their residence in Paphlagonia.—Cf. Strab. xiii. p. 16. viii. p. 157. Sch. Hom. Υ. 329.—Unless we adopt this reading we must suppose with the Scholiast, that they were not separately mentioned in the catalogue, because Homer confounded them with the Leleges, or because they arrived late in the war.

[44]. Οἱ μὲν Σκύθας φασὶν, οἱ δὲ τῶν Μακεδόνων τινὰς, οἱ δὲ τῶν Πελασγῶν. Strab. xiii. p. 16.—To the same tradition alludes the Scholiast: Ἔθνος Παφλαγονίας, οἱ δὲ Σκυθίας· οἱ δὲ τοὺς λεγομένους Καυνίους εἴπον. Il. κ. 429.

[45]. In the dialect of the Dryopes, this mountain was known by the name of Βηλὸς, by which word the Chaldæans denoted the highest circle of the heavens.—Etym. Mag. 196. 19 seq.

[46]. Plin. v. 39.

[47]. Paus. viii. 38. 2. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 599. Meurs. Cypr. i. 28. p. 76. Steph. Byzant. v. Ὄλυμπ. p. 612. e.—Mention, moreover, is made of an eighth Olympos in Cilicia. (Sch. Apoll. ut sup.)—A ninth in Lycia. (Plin. xxi. 7.)

[48]. Phot. Bib. 139. a. 12. 25. Herod. vii. 42. cf. i. 57. Pomp. Mela. i. 19.

[49]. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 40.

[50]. Pliny, xv. 39.

[51]. Plato, Cratyl. I. iv. p. 58.—See, likewise, Müller (Dor. i. 9–11), where, however, too much ingenuity by far is displayed. Another proof of relationship is supplied by Homer (Il. ρ. 288) who represents Hippothoös, a Pelasgian, insulting the body of Patroclos.—Strab. xiii. 3. p. 142.—Niebuhr (i. 28) conjectures that the Trojans were not a Phrygian, but a Pelasgian tribe; though, in reality, both Phrygians and Trojans sprang from the same stock.

[52]. Strab. xiii. 3. p. 144.

[53]. Paus. vii. 2. 8.

[54]. W. f. 7. p. 114.—The Carians themselves are said to have lived habitually amid inaccessible rocks.—Schol. Arist. Av. 292.

[55]. Athen. xiv. 21.

[56]. Thucyd. i. 8.

[57]. Paus. vii. 2. 8. Steph. Byzant. v. Ἀγύλλα, p. 30, d. Ed. Berkel.

[58]. Athen. xv. 12. Thirl. Hist. of Greece, i. 43. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 14.

[59]. Pliny, ii. 31. Steph. de Urb. v. Μίλετ. p. 559. b. c. Eustath. in Dion. Perieg. 825. 456. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 186.

[60]. Il. φ. 86. Cf. Sch. ad κ. 429.

[61]. A glimpse of this fact is obtained from a tradition preserved by Hecatæos:—Τοὺς δὲ Λέλεγας τινὲς μὲν τοὺς αὐτοὺς Καρσὶν εἰκὰζουσιν. Strab. vii. 7. p. 114. From other authorities we learn that the Carians were regarded as Pelasgians.—Habitator incertæ originis. Alii indigenas, sunt qui Pelasgos, quidam Cretas existimant. Pomp. Mela, i. 16.—See likewise Barnes ad Eurip. Heracl. 317. But the strongest testimony is that of Herodotus, i. 171.

[62]. Strabo, xiv. 2. p. 208. Thucyd. i. 8.

[63]. Strabo, viii. 6. p. 204.

[64]. Strab. ap. Palmer. Gr. Ant. i. 10, p. 65. Serv. ad Æn. viii. 725. We again find these two people united at Troy; but not mentioned in the catalogue, because their leader had fallen and there were few of them left to be ranged under Hector. Their leaders were Helicon and his sons. Their capital city “Thebes with lofty gates” had been sacked by Achilles. Strab. xiii. 3. p. 141.

[65]. Travels of Ali Bey.

[66]. Phot. Bib. 141. a.

[67]. According, however, to a tradition preserved by Ephoros, the city of Karides, in this island, was founded by those who escaped with Macar from the Deluge of Deucalion. Athen. iii. 66.

[68]. Plin. v. 39.

[69]. Paus. vii. 22.

[70]. Suid. v. Ἑρμώνιος χάρις. t. i. p. 1044.

[71]. Herm. Pol. Antiq. p. 13. Herod. vi. 138, 140. v. 26.

[72]. Herod. ii. 51.

[73]. Thucyd. i. 98. cum not. Wass.

[74]. Phot. Bib. 139. a.

[75]. Phot. Bib. 141. a. Both the island of Lesbos, and its city Himera were called Pelasgia. Pliny, v. 39.

[76]. Serv. ad Æn. iii. 131. Strabo, x. 3. Pelasgic remains are still found in the island. Pashley, Trav. in Crete, i. 152.

[77]. Apollod. ii. 1. Keightley, Mythol. 405.

[78]. Cf. Athen. xiv. 63.

[79]. Tzet. ad Lyc. 177. Plin. iv. 5. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. i. 1024. Nic. Damasc. in Exc. p. 492.

[80]. Sch. Eurip. Orest. 1245.

[81]. Æsch. Supp. 642. 919.

[82]. Strab. viii. 6. p. 202. Müll. Dor. i. 90. Frag. Incert. Pind. p. 660. Diss.

[83]. Aristot. Meteorol. i. 14. p. 38.

[84]. Strab. viii. 6. p. 204.

[85]. Which Strabo (viii. 3, 157,) says was the original seat of the Caucons.

[86]. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. iv. 264.

[87]. Clem. Alex. i. 6.

[88]. Herod. i. 146. Pliny iv. 10. Nic. Damasc. in Exc. p. 494. Paus. viii. 1. 4.

[89]. Paus. iii. 12. 5.—i. 1. The country, moreover, obtained the name of Lelegia, iv. i. 1.

[90]. Apollod. iii. 10. 3.

[91]. Strab. vii. 7. p. 115.

[92]. From whom the people were called Leleges. Paus. i. 39. 6. He was said to be the son of Poseidon and Libya, and his tomb was shown near the sea-shore, 44. 3.

[93]. Thirl. Hist. of Greece, i. 38.

[94]. Paus. iv. 1. Müll. Dor. i. 116.

[95]. Paus. iv. 36. i.

[96]. Strab. viii. 3. 156.

[97]. Ibid. viii. 3. 152.

[98]. Ibid. viii. 3. 157.

[99]. Ibid. viii. 3. 151.

[100]. Ibid. viii. 3. 157.

[101]. Ibid. viii. 3. 151. The Caucons, however, mentioned by Athena in the Odyssey (θ. 366.) were different from those of Triphylia. The Triphylian Caucons held all the land lying south-east of Pylos on the way to Lacedæmon. Strab. viii. 3. 157.

[102]. Strab. viii. 3. 157.

[103]. Ibid.

[104]. Herod. vii. 14.

[105]. Paus. i. 14. 2.

[106]. Müll. Dor. i. 12.

[107]. Sch. Arist. Acharn. 75.—Nubb. 971.

[108]. Herod. i. 56. vii. 161. Lesbon. Protrept. ii. 22. f. Conf. Wessel. ad Herod. p. 26.

[109]. Herod. i. 57. viii. 44.

[110]. Suid. v. Κραν. t. i. p. 1518. d.

[111]. Strab. vii. 7. p. 114.

[112]. Palmer. Græc. Antiq. p. 62.

[113]. Paus. ii. 8. 3. Philoch. p. 13. Siebel. Herod. ii. 51. seq.

[114]. Æschyl. Suppl. 259. sqq.

[115]. Gœttl. ad Hes. Theog. 311. 1014. Οἱ Τυρσηνοὶ δὲ, Πελασγοί. Sch. Apoll. Rhod. 580. The Pelasgi were the founders of Agylla, afterwards Cære in Etruria. Steph. Byzant. v. Ἀγύλλα, p. 30. d. Plin. iii. 8. Serv. ad Æn. viii. 479, who also gives another tradition according to which Agylla was built by Tyrrhenians from Lydia. Cf. Vibius, Sequest. 421, who says that the Tuscans were Pelasgi. The Poseidoniatæ, a Tuscan tribe, entirely forgot their original language, the manners of their country, and all its festivals, save one, in which they assembled to repeat the ancient names of kings, and recall the remembrance of their original home. They then separated with groans, cries, and mingling together their tears.—Athen. xiv. 81. The Bruttii are said to have been driven out of their country by the Pelasgi (Plin. iii. 8); who also settled in Lucania and Bruttium (9, 10). Pelasgi came out of Peloponnesos into Latium, settled on the Sarna, called themselves Sarrhastes, and built, among others, the town of Nuceria.—Serv. ad Æn. vii. 738. A different tradition brings them from Attica; another from Thessaly, because of the many Pelasgian relics found there.—Idem. viii. 600. Dion. Hal. i. 33.

[116]. Nieb. i. 22. Steph. Byzant. v. Χῖος, p. 758. b. Victor. Var. Lect. i. 10. Athen. vi. 101.

[117]. See Nieb. i. 24.

[118]. Paus. viii. 1. 5.

[119]. Herod. ii. 32. 51. Plato, Tim. t. vii. 22–31. 96. 142.

[120]. Herod. ii. 51.

[121]. Paus. iii. 20. 5.

[122]. We find mention, too, of a Pelasgian Hera, Alex. ab. Alex. p. 321. Sch. Apol. Rhod. i. 14.

[123]. Strab. xiii. 3. p. 144.

[124]. Serv. ad Æn. vi. 630. Winkelmann, ii. 557. On the Cyclopian walls of Crotona. Mus. Cortonen. pl. i. Rom. 1756.

[125]. Palm. Gr. Ant. p. 60. Herm. Pol. Ant. p. 13.

[126]. Palm. Gr. Ant. p. 72.

[127]. δ. 142. Sch. Apol. Rhod. iii. 1323. Natal. Com. 611.

[128]. Phot. Bib. 320. b.

[129]. They were the inventors of the trumpet. Πελασγιὰς ἔβρεμε σάλπιγξ, Nonn. Dion. 47. 568. Cf. Paus. ii. 21. 3. Gœttl. ad Hes. Theog. 311.

[130]. Serv. ad Æn. ix. 505.

[131]. Nieb. i. 23.

[132]. Palm. Gr. Ant. p. 55.

[133]. See, however, the question discussed in Palmerius, Gr. Ant. p. 49. sqq. Conf. Eustath. ad Il. β. 841.

[134]. Plin. vii. 56. Tacit. Annal. xi. 14. et Rupert ad loc. Hygin. Fab. 277. p. 336.

[135]. Serv. ad Æn. ii. 4.

[136]. Aristot. Meteorol. i. 14. p. 39.

[137]. Palm. Gr. Ant. 5.

[138]. I. 58.

[139]. See Mitford (Hist. of Greece, 81. ff.) who is full of these colonies. Herod. i. 2. Conf. Thirl. i. 185. Keightley, Hist. of Greece, p. 11. Müll. Dor. i. 16.

[140]. Cf. Plut. Pericl. § 13.

[141]. See Man. Moschop. ap Arist. Nubb. 982.

[142]. Respect for old age is still a remarkable feature in the Greek character. Thiersch. Etat Actuel de la Grèce, i. 292. On the same trait in their ancestors see Mitf. i. 186. Odyss. ω. 254. Plat. Repub. vi. p. 6. f. Æsch. cont. Tim. § 7.

[143]. See Thirlwall i. 180. sqq. and Mitford i. 181.—Among the Sauromatæ, in the time of Hippocrates, even the women mounted on horseback and fought in battle. They were not allowed to marry until they had slain three enemies.—De Aër. et. Loc. § 78. A circumstance is related of the Parthian court, illustrative of the ferocity which prevailed generally in antiquity. The monarch, it is said, kept a humble friend, whom he fed like a dog, and whipped till the blood flowed, for the slightest offence at table, apparently for the amusement of the guests.—Athen. iv. 38. This trait of barbarism was imitated by the Czar Peter, by servile historians denominated the Great, who used brutally to maltreat the princess Galitzin before his whole court.—Mem. of the Margrav. of Bayreuth, vol. i. p. 34.

[144]. Thucyd. i. 5.

[145]. Il. ρ. 212. seq. The word ξένος signified, actively and passively, the host and the guest. The rights of hospitality were hereditary, the descendants of men being compelled to entertain the descendants of those with whom their forefathers had contracted hospitable ties. Πρόξενοι sometimes signified persons who publicly received ambassadors, as Antenor among the Trojans. Agamemnon had hospitable ties with the Phrygians, because he came of Phrygian ancestors. Damm. v. ξένος. Sch. Aristoph. Eq. 347. Cf. Virg. Æn. viii. 165. et Serv. ad loc. Plat. Soph. t. iv. p. 125, where Socrates alludes to a passage in Homer, in which Zeus is said to be the companion of the wanderer, observing jocularly that the Eleatic stranger might probably have been some deity in disguise. Cf. Tomas. Tess. Hosp. c. 23. ap. Gronov. Thesaur. ix. 266. sqq. It was a proverb at Athens that the doors of the Prytaneion would keep out no stranger.—Sch. Aristoph. Ach. 127. The Lucanians had a law thus expressed: “If a stranger arriving at sunset ask a lodging of any one, let him who refuses to be his host be fined for want of hospitality.” The object, I imagine, of the law, says Ælian (Var. Hist. iv. i.) was at once to avenge the stranger and Hospitable Zeus.

[146]. According to Hippocrates, the inhabitants of lofty mountains, well watered, are generally hardy and of tall stature, but fierce and ferocious. In saying this, the philosopher describes the Arcadians without naming them. De Aër. et Loc. § 120.

[147]. Athen. iv. 74.

[148]. Clem. Alex. Strom. i. p. 355. l. 12. Wink. Hist. de l’Art, i. 316.