At this point, where we are bringing our inquiries to a conclusion, we would fain look a little nearer into the mists which shroud the past, and descry, were it possible, the actual dawn of history for the individual nations; would see, not only how the larger bodies of men have travelled through the prehistoric stages of their journey, but how, having reached its settled home, each people begins to emerge from the obscurity that surrounds its early days. What were the exact means, we ask, whereby a collection of nomadic or half-nomadic tribes separated, reunited, separated again, and developed upon different soils the qualities which distinguish them from all others? What is, in fact, the beginning of real national life?
The worlds which circle round the sun, or rather, the multitudinous systems of orbs which fill space, might pose a like inquiry. There was a time when these which are now distinct worlds were confounded as a continuous nebula, a thin vapour of matter whirling round in one unchanging circle. In time, their motion became less uniform, vortices—as the word is—set in, smaller bodies of vaporous matter which, still obeying the universal movement, set up internal motions among themselves, and cooling, separated into separate orbs. How like is all this process to the history of nations! These, confounded once together in one unstable mass of wandering tribes, have in like manner separated from their nebulous brethren, and, setting up their internal vortices, have coalesced into nations. And yet as a system of planets, albeit with their own distinctive motions, do all revolve in one direction round one central force, so the different families of nations, which we may call the planets of a system, seem in like manner compelled by a power external to themselves in one particular course to play a particular part in the world’s history. The early stone-age Turanians, the Cushite civilizers of Egypt and Chaldæa, the Semitic people, may all be looked upon as different systems of nations, each with its mission to the human race. Thus, too, the Aryan people, after they had once become so separated as to lose all family remembrance, are found working together to accomplish an assigned destiny, migrating in every direction, and carrying with them everywhere the seeds of a higher civilization.
The rays of history are seen gradually spreading from Egypt up through Mesopotamia to the nations of Palestine—not yet the land of the Hebrews—then to Asia Minor, and so to Greece. That is the land-root of civilization. We are speaking rather of succession in time than of actual succession by inheritance. We cannot tell, at any rate, that Chaldæa was in any way indebted to Egypt for its early civilization, or Egypt to Chaldæa. But with the exception of that blank, the rest of the progress of civilization by inheritance does follow pretty clearly. The Assyrian Empire inherited from the old Babylonian Empire. And the nations of Palestine inherited from Egypt and Assyria both. On the borders of Asia Minor were two peoples who commanded—for a time, at any rate—the trade routes from Palestine and Mesopotamia into Asia Minor. These two peoples were the Hittites[139] and the Phœnicians. One commanded the trade route by land, the other commanded it by sea. Of the first we know at present very little—little more than that they had a capital at Karkemish; that they commanded the navigation of the Orontes and the Upper Euphrates; and that they were at one time strong enough to stand at the head of a confederation of peoples who made war upon Egypt when at the summit of her power. There can be little doubt that the Hittites passed on to the peoples of Asia Minor, who were in blood nearly allied to the Greeks, some of the civilization of the Semitic peoples farther south, and that these peoples passed the same on to the Greeks of Asia Minor.
But of course the Phœnicians must still be reckoned as the great transporters of civilization from Egypt and from Asia to the rest of the world. They could hardly be said to possess a country; but they possessed cities of vast importance and no small magnificence along the coast of Palestine—Lamyra, Aradus, Byblos, Sydon, Tyre. From these centres went out that boundless maritime enterprise which made the Phœnicians the trading people of the world. Very early—in pre-historic ages—the Phœnicians had possessed themselves of Cyprus. From that point to the Grecian coast of Asia Minor, or to the coasts and islands on either side of the Ægean, was an easy transition; then on to the Mediterranean, to Sicily and Italy, but more especially to the island of Sardinia; or again to Egypt and the farther coasts of Africa on to Spain, and finally, through the Pillars of Heracles, to the far-off ‘tin islands’ of the west, which were, it is likely enough, the British Isles. This is, in brief, the picture of the doings of the Phœnicians long before the days of history had begun to dawn upon the Aryan nations of the Mediterranean.
If we desire to get any idea of the process by which the separation of the Aryan peoples became completed, we must put quite upon one side the idea of a nation as we see it now. Now, when we speak the word, we think of a political unit subject to one government, stationary, and confined within pretty exact limits of space. But very different were the nations during the process of their formation; there was scarcely any political unity among them, their homes were unfixed, their members constantly shifting and changing combinations, like those heaps of sand we see carried along in a cyclone. Let us, then, forget our political atlases, with their different colours and well-marked boundaries, and think not of the inanimate adjunct of a nation, the soil on which it happens to dwell, but of the nation as the men of whom it is made up. The earliest things we discern are those vortices set up in the midst of a homogeneous people, an attractive power somewhere in the midst of them which draws them into closer fellowship. It acts like the attractive power of a crystal in selecting from any of the surrounding matters the fragments most suited to its proper formation. Thus the earliest traditions of a people are generally the history of some individual tribe from which the whole nation feigns itself descended; either because of its actual pre-eminence from the beginning, the power it had of drawing other tribes to share its fortunes, or because, out of many tribes drawn together by some common interest or sentiment, the bards of later days selected this one tribe from among the others, and adopted its traditions for their own. If we remember this, much that would otherwise appear a hopeless mass of contradiction and ambiguity is capable of receiving a definite meaning.
The Greeks.
The first rays of European history shine upon the island-dotted sea and bounding coasts of the Ægean. Here sprang into life the Greek people, who have left behind so splendid a legacy of art and philosophy. These, as has been already said, made their entry into Europe traversing the southern shores of the Euxine, along which passed, still as one people, the ancestors of the Greeks and the Italians. The former, at all events, seem to have delayed long upon their route, and it was upon these shores, or perhaps rather in the tableland of ancient Phrygia, that first began the separation of two races who reunited to form the Greek nation. Some, the older race, the Pelasgi, made their way to the Hellespont, and by that route into European Greece; the others, the Ionians as they subsequently became, passed onward to the sea-shore of Asia Minor, and, tempted no doubt by the facilities of the voyage, crossed from this mainland to the neighbouring islands, which lie so thickly scattered over the Ægean that the mariner passing from shore to shore of Asiatic and European Greece need never on his voyage lose sight of land. They did not, however, find these islands deserted, or occupied by savages only. The Phœnicians had been there beforehand, as they were beforehand upon almost every coast in Europe, and had made mercantile stations and established small colonies for the purposes of trading with the Pelasgi of Greece. The adventurous Ionians were thus brought early into contact with the advanced civilization of Asia, and from this source gained in all probability a knowledge of navigation, letters, and some of the Semitic mythical legends. Thus while the mainland Greeks had altered little of the primitive culture, the germs of a Hellenic civilization, of a Hellenic life, were being fostered in the islands of the Ægean. We see this reflected in many Greek myths—in the legend, for example, of Minôs and his early Cretan kingdom; in the myth of Aphroditê springing from the sea by Cythera; and in the worship of Phœbus Apollo which sprang up in Delos. Legend spoke of two Minôses—one, the legislator of Crete, representative of all that was most ancient in national policy, and for that reason transferred to be the judge of souls in Hell; the second, he who made war against the Athenians, and compelled them to pay their dreadful yearly tribute of seven youths and seven maidens to be devoured of the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth. Until Theseus came. No doubt the two Minôses are but amplifications of one being, who, whether mythical or historical, is an echo in the memory of Greeks of the still older Cretan kingdom. In both tales Minôs has a dreadful aspect; perhaps because this ‘Lord of the Isles’ had been inimical to the early growing communities of the mainland.
The myths of Aphroditê and Apollo have been already commented upon as enfolding within them the history of their origin. Aphroditê is essentially an Asiatic divinity; she springs to life in a Phœnician colony. But Phœbus Apollo is before all things the god of the Ionian Greeks; and as their first national life begins in the islands, his birth too takes place in one of these, the central one of all, Delos. In Homer, Delos, or Ortygia, is feigned to be the central spot of the earth.
Thus the Greeks were from the beginning a commercial people. Before their history began, there is proof that they had established a colony in the Delta of the Nile; and the frequent use of the word Javan[140] in the Bible—which here stands for Ionians—shows how familiar was their name to the dwellers in Asia. Wherever these mariners came in contact with their brethren of the continent, they excited in them the love of adventure, and planted the germs of a new life, so that it was under their paramount influence that these primitive Greeks began to coalesce from mutually hostile tribes into nations. In Northern Greece it was that the gathering together of tribes and cities first began. These confederations were always based primarily upon religious union, the protection of a common deity, a union to protect and support a common shrine. They were called Amphictyonies, confederations of neighbours, a name which lived long in the history of Greece. These amphictyonies seem first to have arisen in the north. Here too the words Hellenic, Hellenes, first spring up as national epithets. Hellas never extended farther north than the north of Thessaly, and was naturally marked off from foreign countries by Olympia and Pierus. But the term spread southwards till it embraced all Greek-speaking lands to the extremity of the peninsula, and over the islands of the Ægean, and the coast of Asia Minor, on to the countless colonies which issued from Greek shores; for Hellas was not a geographical term, it included all the peoples of true Hellenic speech, and distinguished them from the barbaroi, the ‘babblers,’ of other lands.
The two great nations of the Græco-Italic family kept up some knowledge of each other after they had forgotten the days of their common life, and, strange to say, in days before either of the two races had come to regard itself as a distinct people, each was so regarded by the other. The Italians classed the Greeks in the common name of Græci or Graii, and the Greeks bestowed the name of Ὀπικός upon the nation of the Italians. It is curious to reflect upon the different destinies which lay ahead of these two races, who came under such similar conditions into their new homes. Whether it were through some peculiarity in their national character, or a too-rapid civilization, or the two great influences of a changeful character and adventurous life, the Greeks never cemented properly together the units of their race; the Italians, through a much slower process of integration, lived to weld their scattered fragments into the most powerful nation the world has ever seen.