respecting the early history of the four great divisions of the race. Æolus succeeded his father Hellen as king of Hellas in Thessaly, but his descendants occupied a great part of central Greece, as far as the isthmus of Corinth, and also took possession of the western coast of Peloponnesus. The Æolians were the most widely diffused of all the descendants of Hellen. Many of their towns, such as Corinth and Iolcus in Thessaly, were situated upon the coast, and the worship of Poseidon (Neptune), the god of the sea, prevailed extensively among them. The Achæans appear in the latter part of the Heroic age as the most warlike of the Grecian races. At that time they are represented as inhabiting the original abode of the Hellenes in Thessaly, and also the cities of Mycenae, Argos, and Sparta, in the Peloponnesus. The most distinguished of the Grecian heroes in the Trojan war were Achæans; and such was the celebrity of the race at that period that Homer frequently gives their name to the whole body of the Greeks. The Dorians and Ionians are of far less importance in the ancient legends, though they afterwards became the two leading races in Greece, to whom the Spartans and Athenians respectively belonged. The Dorians were almost confined to the small mountainous district named after them, lying between Thessaly and Phocis; the Ionians were found chiefly in Attica and along the narrow slip of coast in the south of Peloponnesus, which in historical times was known by the name of Achaia. § 4. Such was the general belief of the Greeks respecting the early diffusion of their race. But it is natural for us to go farther back, and to endeavor to ascertain the real origin of the people. Now the only sure and certain means of ascertaining the origin of any people is a knowledge of its language. Tradition misleads as often as it guides the inquirer; and the indications afforded by mythology, manners and customs, are frequently deceptive and always vague. Language, on the other hand, is an enduring memorial; and, whatever changes it may have undergone in the course of ages, it rarely loses those fundamental elements which proclaim its origin and affinities. If then we conduct our inquiry into the origin of the Greek people by means of their language, we have no difficulty in coming to a satisfactory conclusion. The Greek language is a member of that great family of languages to which modern scholars have given the name of Indo-European. The various nations speaking the different varieties of this language were originally one people, inhabiting the high table-land of central Asia. At some period, long antecedent to all profane history, they issued from their primeval seats, and spread over a considerable portion both of Asia and of Europe. In Asia the ancient Hindoos, who spoke Sanscrit, and the Medes and Persians, whose language was the Zend, were the two principal branches of this people. In Europe the Germans, Pelasgians, Slavonians, and Celts were the four chief varieties. It is foreign to our present purpose to give any account of the other branches of the Indo-European family; but a few remarks must be made upon the Pelasgians, from whom the Greeks derived their origin. § 5. The Pelasgians are represented by the Greeks themselves as the most ancient inhabitants of their land. The primitive name of Greece is said to have been Pelasgia. In the historical period, those parts of Greece which had been subject to the fewest changes of inhabitants were supposed to be peopled by the descendants of the Pelasgians. This was especially the case with Arcadia and Attica, which claimed to have been inhabited by the same tribes from time immemorial. The Pelasgians were spread over the Italian as well as the Grecian peninsula; and the Pelasgic language thus formed the basis of the Latin as well as of the Greek. It is true that Herodotus speaks of the Pelasgic as a foreign language, totally distinct from the Greek; but his testimony on such a subject is not entitled to any weight, since the ancients were lamentably deficient in philological knowledge, and had no notion of the affinity of languages. Of the Pelasgians themselves our information is scanty. They were not mere barbarians. They are represented as tilling the ground and dwelling in walled cities. Their religion appears to have been essentially the same as the religion of the Hellenes. Their great divinity was Jove, the national Hellenic god, and the chief seat of his worship was Dodōna in Epirus. Hence Homer gives to the Dodonaan Jove the title of Pelasgic; and his oracle at Dodona was always regarded as the most ancient in Greece. The Pelasgians were divided into several tribes, such as the Hellenes, Leleges, Caucōnes, and others. In what respects the Hellenes were superior to the other Pelasgic tribes we do not know; but they appear at the first dawn of history as the dominant race in Greece. The rest of the Pelasgians disappeared before them or were incorporated with them; their dialect of the Pelasgic tongue became the language of Greece; and their worship of the Olympian Jove gradually supplanted the more ancient worship of the Dodonæan god. § 6. The civilization of the Greeks and the development of their language bear all the marks of home growth, and probably *A fortified town was called Larissa by the Pelasgians. were little affected by foreign influence. The traditions, however, of the Greeks would point to a contrary conclusion. It was a general belief among them that the Pelasgians were reclaimed from barbarism by Oriental strangers, who settled in the country and introduced among the rude inhabitants the first elements of civilization. Many of these traditions, however, are not ancient legends, but owe their origin to the philosophical speculations of a later age, which loved to represent an imaginary progress of society from the time when men fed on acorns and ran wild in woods, to the time when they became united into political communities and owned the supremacy of law and reason. The speculative Greeks who visited Egypt in the sixth and fifth centuries before the Christian era were profoundly impressed with the monuments of the old Egyptian monarchy, which even in that early age of the world indicated a gray and hoary antiquity. The Egyptian priests were not slow to avail themselves of the impression made upon their visitors, and told the latter many a wondrous tale to prove that the civilization, the arts, and even the religion of the Greeks, all came from the land of the Nile. These tales found easy believers; they were carried back to Greece, and repeated with various modifications and embellishments; and thus no doubt arose the greater number of the traditions respecting Egyptian colonies in Greece. § 7. Although we may therefore reject with safety the traditions respecting these Egyptian colonies, two are of so much celebrity that they cannot be passed over entirely in an account of the early ages of Greece. Attica is said to have been indebted for the arts of civilized life to Cecrops, a native of Sais in Egypt. To him is ascribed the foundation of the city of Athens, the institution of marriage, and the introduction of religious rites and ceremonies. The Acropolis or citadel of Athens, to which the original city was confined, continued to bear the name of Cecropia even in later times. Argos, in like manner, is said to have been founded by the Egyptian Danaus, who fled to Greece with his fifty daughters to escape from the persecution of their suitors, the fifty sons of his brother Ægyptus. Egyptian stranger was elected king by the natives, and from him the tribe of the Danai derived their name, which Homer frequently uses as a general appellation for the Greeks. The only fact which lends any countenance to the existence of an Egyptian colony in Greece is the discovery of the remains of two pyramids at no great distance from Argos; but this form of building is not confined to Egypt. Pyramids are found in India, Babylonia, and Mexico, and may therefore have been erected by the early inhabitants of Greece independently of any connexion with Egypt. The § 8. Another colony, not less celebrated and not more credible than the two just mentioned, is the one led from Asia by Pelops, from whom the southern peninsula of Greece derived its name of Peloponnesus. Pelops is usually represented as a native of Sipylus in Phrygia, and the son of the wealthy king Tantalus. By means of his riches, which he brought with him into Greece, he became king of Mycena and the founder of a powerful dynasty, one of the most renowned in the Heroic age of Greece. From him was descended Agamemnon, who led the Grecian host against Troy. § 9. The case is different with the Phoenician colony, which is said to have been founded by Cadmus at Thebes in Boeotia. We have decisive evidence that the Phoenicians planted colonies at an early period in the islands of Greece; and it is only natural to believe that they also settled upon the shores of the mainland. Whether there was such a person as the Phoenician Cadmus, and whether he built the town called Cadmea, which afterwards became the citadel of Thebes, as the ancient legends relate, can not be determined; but, setting aside all tradition on the subject, there is one fact which proves indisputably an early intercourse between Phoenicia and Greece. It was to the Phoenicians that the Greeks were indebted for the art of writing; for both the names and the forms of the letters in the Greek alphabet are evidently derived from the Phoenician. With this exception the Oriental strangers left no permanent traces of their settlements in Greece; and the population of the country continued to be essentially Grecian, uncontaminated by any foreign elements. Paris, from the Æginetan Sculptures. Ajax, from the Eginetan Sculptures. CHAPTER II. THE GRECIAN HEROES. § 1. Mythical character of the Heroic Age. § 2. Hercules. § 3. Theseus. $4. Minos. §5. Voyage of the Argonauts. § 6. The Seven against Thebes and the Epigoni. §7. The Trojan War as related in the Iliad. §8. Later additions. 9. Return of the Grecian heroes from Troy. 10. Date of the fall of Troy. § 11. Whether the Heroic legends contain any historical facts. 12. The Homeric poems present a picture of a real state of society. § 1. Ir was universally believed by the Greeks that their native land was in the earlier ages ruled by a noble race of beings, possessing a superhuman though not a divine nature, and superior to ordinary men in strength of body and greatness of soul. These are the Heroes of Grecian mythology, whose exploits and adventures form the great mine from which the Greeks derived inexhaustible materials for their poetry "Presenting Thebes or Pelops' line, |