It is worthy of notice that the monetary system established at Korkyra was thoroughly Grecian and Corinthian, graduated on the usual scale of obols, drachms, minæ, and talents, without including any of those native Italian or Sicilian elements which were adopted by the cities in Magna Græcia and Sicily. The type of the Corinthian coins seems also to have passed to those of Leukas and Ambrakia.[790]
Of the islands of Zakynthus and Kephallenia, Zante and Cephalonia, we hear very little: of Ithaka, so interesting from the story of the Odyssey, we have no historical information at all. The inhabitants of Zakynthus were Achæans from Peloponnesus: Kephallenia was distributed among four separate city governments.[791] Neither of these islands play any part in Grecian history until the time of the maritime empire of Athens, after the Persian war.
CHAPTER XXIV.
AKARNANIANS. — EPIROTS.
Some notice must be taken of those barbarous or non-Hellenic nations who formed the immediate neighbors of Hellas, west of the range of Pindus, and north of that range which connects Pindus with Olympus,—as well as of those other tribes, who, though lying more remote from Hellas proper, were yet brought into relations of traffic or hostility with the Hellenic colonies.
Between the Greeks and these foreign neighbors, the Akarnanians, of whom I have already spoken briefly in my preceding volume, form the proper link of transition. They occupied the territory between the river Achelôus, the Ionian sea, and the Ambrakian gulf: they were Greeks, and admitted as such to contend at the Pan-Hellenic games,[792] yet they were also closely connected with the Amphilochi and Agræi, who were not Greeks. In manners, sentiments, and intelligence, they were half-Hellenic and half-Epirotic,—like the Ætolians and the Ozolian Lokrians. Even down to the time of Thucydidês, these nations were subdivided into numerous petty communities, lived in unfortified villages, were frequently in the habit of plundering each other, and never permitted themselves to be unarmed: in case of attack, they withdrew their families and their scanty stock, chiefly cattle, to the shelter of difficult mountains or marshes. They were for the most part light-armed, few among them being trained to the panoply of the Grecian hoplite; but they were both brave and skilful in their own mode of warfare, and the sling, in the hands of the Akarnanian, was a weapon of formidable efficiency.[793]
Notwithstanding this state of disunion and insecurity, however, the Akarnanians maintained a loose political league among themselves, and a hill near the Amphilochian Argos, on the shores of the Ambrakian gulf, had been fortified to serve as a judgment-seat, or place of meeting, for the settlement of disputes. And it seems that Stratus and Œniadæ had both become fortified in some measure towards the commencement of the Peloponnesian war. The former, the most considerable township in Akarnania, was situated on the Achelôus, rather high up its course,—the latter was at the mouth of the river, and was rendered difficult of approach by its inundations.[794] Astakus, Solium, Palærus, and Alyzia, lay on or near the coast of the Ionian sea, between Œniadæ and Leukas: Phytia, Koronta, Medeôn, Limnæa, and Thyrium, were between the southern shore of the Ambrakian gulf and the river Achelôus.
The Akarnanians appear to have produced many prophets. They traced up their mythical ancestry, as well as that of their neighbors the Amphilochians, to the most renowned prophetic family among the Grecian heroes,—Amphiaraus, with his sons Alkmæôn and Amphilochus: Akarnan, the eponymous hero of the nation, and other eponymous heroes of the separate towns, were supposed to be the sons of Alkmæôn.[795] They are spoken of, together with the Ætolians, as mere rude shepherds, by the lyric poet Alkman, and so they seem to have continued with little alteration until the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, when we hear of them, for the first time, as allies of Athens and as bitter enemies of the Corinthian colonies on their coast. The contact of those colonies, however, and the large spread of Akarnanian accessible coast, could not fail to produce some effect in socializing and improving the people. And it is probable that this effect would have been more sensibly felt, had not the Akarnanians been kept back by the fatal neighborhood of the Ætolians, with whom they were in perpetual feud,—a people the most unprincipled and unimprovable of all who bore the Hellenic name, and whose habitual faithlessness stood in marked contrast with the rectitude and steadfastness of the Akarnanian character.[796] It was in order to strengthen the Akarnanians against these rapacious neighbors, that the Macedonian Kassander urged them to consolidate their numerous small townships into a few considerable cities. Partially, at least, the recommendation was carried into effect, so as to aggrandize Stratus and one or two other towns; but in the succeeding century, the town of Leukas seems to lose its original position as a separate Corinthian colony, and to pass into that of chief city of Akarnania,[797] which is lost only by the sentence of the Roman conquerors.
Passing over the borders of Akarnania, we find small nations or tribes not considered as Greeks, but known, from the fourth century B. C. downwards, under the common name of Epirots. This word signifies properly, inhabitants of a continent, as opposed to those of an island or a peninsula, and came only gradually to be applied by the Greeks as their comprehensive denomination to designate all those diverse tribes, between the Ambrakian gulf on the south and west, Pindus on the east, and the Illyrians and Macedonians to the north and north-east. Of these Epirots, the principal were,—the Chaonians, Thesprotians, Kassôpians, and Molossians,[798] who occupied the country inland as well as maritime along the Ionian sea, from the Akrokeraunian mountains to the borders of Ambrakia in the interior of the Ambrakian gulf. The Agræans and Amphilochians dwelt eastward of the last-mentioned gulf, bordering upon Akarnania: the Athamânes, the Tymphæans, and the Talares, lived along the western skirts and high range of Pindus. Among these various tribes it is difficult to discriminate the semi-Hellenic from the non-Hellenic; for Herodotus considers both Molossians and Thesprotians as Hellenic,—and the oracle of Dôdôna, as well as the Nekyomanteion, or holy cavern for evoking the dead, of Acheron, were both in the territory of the Thesprotians, and both, in the time of the historian, Hellenic. Thucydidês, on the other hand, treats both Molossians and Thesprotians as barbaric, and Strabo says the same respecting the Athamânes, whom Plato numbers as Hellenic.[799] As the Epirots were confounded with the Hellenic communities towards the south, so they become blended with the Macedonian and Illyrian tribes towards the north. The Macedonian Orestæ, north of the Cambunian mountains and east of Pindus, are called by Hekatæus a Molossian tribe; and Strabo even extends the designation Epirots to the Illyrian Paroræia and Atintânes, west of Pindus, nearly on the same parallel of latitude with the Orestæ.[800] It must be remembered, as observed above, that while the designations Illyrians and Macedonians are properly ethnical, given to denote analogies of language, habits, feeling, and supposed origin, and probably acknowledged by the people themselves,—the name Epirots belongs to the Greek language, is given by Greeks alone, and marks nothing except residence on a particular portion of the continent. Theopompus (about 340 B. C.) reckoned fourteen distinct Epirotic nations, among whom the Molossians and Chaonians were the principal. It is possible that some of these may have been semi-Illyrian, others semi-Macedonian, though all were comprised by him under the common name Epirots.[801]
Of these various tribes, who dwelt between the Akrokeraunian promontory and the Ambrakian gulf, some, at least, appear to have been of ethnical kindred with portions of the inhabitants of southern Italy. There were Chaonians on the gulf of Tarentum, before the arrival of the Greek settlers, as well as in Epirus; we do not find the name Thesprotians in Italy, but we find there a town named Pandosia, and a river named Acheron, the same as among the Epirotic Thesprotians: the ubiquitous name Pelasgian is connected both with one and with the other. This ethnical affinity, remote or near, between Œnotrians and Epirots, which we must accept as a fact without being able to follow it into detail, consists at the same time with the circumstance,—that both seem to have been susceptible of Hellenic influences to an unusual degree, and to have been moulded, with comparatively little difficulty, into an imperfect Hellenism, like that of the Ætolians and Akarnanians. The Thesprotian conquerors of Thessaly passed in this manner into Thessalian Greeks, and the Amphilochians who inhabited Argos on the Ambrakian gulf, were Hellenized by the reception of Greeks from Ambrakia, though the Amphilochians situated without the city, still remained barbarous in the time of Thucydidês:[802] a century afterwards, probably, they would be Hellenized, like the rest, by a longer continuance of the same influences,—as happened with the Sikels in Sicily.