The little promontory and peninsula, famous in the history of mankind as Greece, or Hellas, projects into the Mediterranean Sea from the South of Europe. It is insignificant on the map, its area being only two thirds as large as that of the State of Maine. But never was a country better situated in order to develop a new civilization. A temperate climate, where the vine, olive, and fig ripened with wheat, barley, and flax; a rich alluvial soil, resting on limestone, and contained in a series of valleys, each surrounded by mountains; a position equally remote from excesses of heat and cold, dryness and moisture; and finally, the ever-present neighborhood of the sea,—constituted a home well fitted for the physical culture of a perfect race of men.
Comparative Geography, which has pointed out so many relations between the terrestrial conditions of nations and their moral attainments, has laid great stress on the connection between the extent of sea-coast and a country's civilization. The sea line of Europe, compared with its area, is more extensive than that of any other continent, and Europe has had a more various and complete intellectual development than elsewhere. Africa, which has the shortest sea line compared with its area, has been most tardy in mental activity. The sea is the highway of nations and the promoter of commerce; and commerce, which brings different races together, awakens the intellect by the contact of different languages, religions, arts, and manners. Material civilization, it is true, does not commence on the sea-shore, but in river intervals. The arts of life were invented in the valleys of the Indus and Ganges, of the Yellow and Blue Rivers of China, of the Euphrates and the Nile. But the Phoenician navigators in the Mediterranean brought to the shores of Greece the knowledge of the arts of Egypt, the manufactures of Tyre, and the products of India and Africa. Every part of the coast of Greece is indented with bays and harbors. The Mediterranean, large enough to separate the nations on its shores, and so permit independent and distinct evolution of character, is not so large as to divide them. Coasting vessels, running within sight of land, could easily traverse its shores. All this tempted to navigation, and so the Greeks learned to be a race of sailors. What the shore line of Europe was to that of the other continents, that the shore line of Greece was to the rest of Europe. Only long after, in the Baltic, the Northern Mediterranean, did a similar land-locked sea create a similar love of navigation among the Scandinavians.[204]
Another feature in the physical geography of Greece must be noticed as having an effect on the psychical condition of its inhabitants. Mountains intersected every part, dividing its tribes from each other. In numerous valleys, separated by these mountain walls, each clan, left to itself, formed a special character of its own. The great chain of Pindus with its many branches, the lofty ridges of the Peloponnesus, allowed the people of Thessaly, Boeotia, Attica, Phocis, Locris, Argolis, Arcadia, Laconia, to attain those individual traits which distinguish them during all the course of Greek history.
Such physical conditions as we have described are eminently favorable to a free and full development of national character. But this word "development," so familiar to modern thought, implies not only outward circumstances to educate, but a special germ to be educated. So long as the human being is regarded as a lump of dough, to be moulded into any shape by external influences, no such term as "development" was needed. But philosophical historians now admit national character to be the result of two factors,—the original ethnic germ in the race, and the terrestrial influences which unfold it.[205] A question, therefore, of grave moment concerns the origin of the Hellenic people. Whence are they derived? what are their affinities? and from what region did they come?
The science of Comparative Philology, one of the great triumphs of modern scholarship, has enabled us now, for the first time, to answer this question. What no Greek knew, what neither Herodotus, Plato, nor Aristotle could tell us, we are now able to state with certainty. The Greek language, both in its grammar and its vocabulary, belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, of which the Sanskrit is the elder sister. Out of eleven thousand six hundred and thirty-three Greek words, some two thousand are found to be Sanskrit, and three thousand more to belong to other branches of the Indo-European tongues. As the words common to the Greek and the Sanskrit must have been in use by both races before their separation, while living together in Central Asia, we have a clew to the degree of civilization attained by the Greeks before they arrived in Europe. Thus it appears that they brought from Asia a familiarity with oxen and cows, horses, dogs, swine, goats, geese; that they could work in metals; that they built houses, and were acquainted with the elements of agriculture, especially with farinaceous grains; they used salt; they had boats propelled by oars, but not sails; they divided the year by moons, and had a decimal notation.[206]
The Greeks, as a race, came from Asia later than the Latin races. They belonged to that powerful Indo-European race, to which Europe owes its civilization, and whose chief branches are the Hindoos, the Persians, the Greeks, the Latins, the Kelts, the Teutonic tribes, and the Slavi. The original site of the race was, as we have seen in our chapter on Brahmanism, in Bactria; and the earliest division of this people could not have been later than three thousand or four thousand years before the Christian era. When the Hellenic branch entered Europe we have now no means of saying. It was so long anterior to Greek history that all knowledge of the time was lost, and only the faintest traditions of an Asiatic origin of their nation are to be found in Greek writers.
The Hellenic tribes, at the beginning of the seventh century before Christ, were divided into four groups,—the Achaians, Æolians, Dorians, and Ionians,—with outlying tribes more or less akin. But this Hellenic people had been preceded in Greece by another race known as Pelasgians. It is so difficult to say who these were, that Mr. Grote, in despair, pronounces them unknowable, and relinquishes the problem. Some facts concerning them may, however, be considered as established. Their existence in Greece is pronounced by Thirwall to be "the first unquestionable fact in Greek history." Homer speaks (Iliad, II. 681) of "Pelasgian Argos," and of "spear-skilled Pelasgians," "noble Pelasgians," "Pelasgians inhabiting fertile Larissa" (II. 840; X. 429). Herodotus frequently speaks of the Pelasgians. He says that the Dorians were a Hellenic nation, the Ionians were Pelasgic; he does not profess to know what language the Pelasgians used, but says that those who in his time inhabited Crestona, Placia, and other regions, spoke a barbarous language, and that the people of Attica were formerly Pelasgic. He mentions the Pelasgians as remaining to his time in Arcadia, after the Dorians had expelled them from the rest of the Peloponnesus; says that the Samothracians adopted the mysteries of the Kabiri from the Pelasgians; that the Pelasgians sacrificed victims to unknown gods at Dodona, and asked that oracle advice about what names they should give their gods. These names, taken from Egypt, the Grecians received from them. Hellas was formerly called Pelasgia. The Athenians expelled the Pelasgians from Attica (whether justly or unjustly, Herodotus does not undertake to say), where they were living under Mount Hymettus; whereupon the Pelasgians of Lemnos, in revenge, carried off a number of Athenian women, and afterward murdered them; as an expiation of which crime they were finally commanded by the oracle at Delphi to surrender that island to Miltiades and the Athenians. Herodotus repeatedly informs us that nearly the whole Ionian race were formerly called Pelasgians.[207]
From all this it appears that the Pelasgians were the ancient occupants of nearly all Greece; that they were probably of the same stock as their Hellenic successors, but of another branch; that their language was somewhat different, and contained words of barbaric (that is Phoenician or Egyptian) origin, but not so different as to remain distinct after the conquest. From the Pelasgian names which remain, it is highly probable that this people was of the same family with the old Italians.[208] They must have constituted the main stem of the Greek people. The Ionians of Attica, the most brilliant portion of the Greeks, were of Pelasgic origin. It may be therefore assumed, without much improbability, that while the Dorian element gave the nation its strength and vital force, the Pelasgic was the source of its intellectual activity and success in literature and art. Ottfried Muller remarks that "there is no doubt that most of the ancient religions of Greece owed their origin to this race. The Zeus and Diônê of Dodona, Zeus and Hêrê of Argos, Hêphæstos and Athênê of Athens, Dêmetêr and Cora of Eleusis, Hermês and Artemis of Arcadia, together with Cadmus and the Cabiri of Thebes, cannot properly be referred to any other origin."[209]
Welcker[210] thinks that the ethnological conceptions of Aeschylus, in his "Suppliants," are invaluable helps in the study of the Pelasgic relations to the Greeks. The poet makes Pelasgos the king of Argos, and represents him as ruling over the largest part of Greece. His subjects he calls Greeks, and they vote in public assembly by holding up their hands, so distinguishing them from the Dorians, among whom no such democracy prevailed.[211] He protects the suppliant women against their Egyptian persecutors, who claimed them as fugitives from slavery. The character assigned by Aeschylus to this representative of the Pelasgian race is that of a just, wise, and religious king, who judged that it was best to obey God, even at the risk of displeasing man.
It is evident, therefore, that from the earliest times there were in Greece two distinct elements, either two different races or two very distinct branches of a common race. First known as Pelasgians and Hellênes, they afterwards took form as the Ionian and Dorian peoples. And it is evident also that the Greek character, so strong yet so flexible, so mighty to act and so open to receive, with its stern virtues and its tender sensibilities, was the result of the mingling of these antagonist tendencies. Two continents may have met in Greece, if to the genius of that wonderful people Asia lent her intellect and Africa her fire. It was the marriage of soul and body, of nature and spirit, of abstract speculation and passionate interest in this life. Darkness rests on the period when this national life was being created; the Greeks themselves have preserved no record of it.