The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

In the present case, then, north-eastern Italy was originally divided between the true Italians, akin to the Umbri, and the extinct or modified Slavonians of Liburnia and the country of the Veneti.

Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, to which we may now attend, I imagine, in the earliest times, to have been occupied by the ancestors of the Greeks, a doctrine to which I direct the careful consideration of scholars; since it implies a great change in all our preconceived opinions, and not only makes the Hellenes of Greece as foreign to Hellas, as the Anglo-Saxons were once to England, but deduces them from Italy, and that by means of a maritime migration—a maritime migration which implies not only that they were a population foreign to the Greek soil, but that their descendants were a mixed stock; since no mode of migration is less favourable to the purity of the migrant population than a sea-voyage, where space is limited and females are an incumbrance. Such was, undoubtedly, the origin of the Greeks of Asia Minor and the Ægean Islands. Such, I believe, to have been the origin of the Greeks of Peloponnesus and Northern Hellas.

The observations on the relation between the Slavonic and Latin languages have prepared the way to this hypothesis, wherein the necessity of finding a geographical connection between cognate forms of speech recurs.

Now the connection between the Greek and Latin languages is a fact that few have denied, and no one has explained. Unless we derive one from the other, we must refer both to some common source. But the locality of this mother tongue is difficult to fix—so difficult that no satisfactory doctrine concerning it has ever been exhibited. Greece is an eminently small area, and Italy is of no great size; for it must be remembered that the ancient country of the nations whose language was allied to the Latin, and, through the Latin, to the Greek, are not found far north of the Tiber, at the beginning of the truly historical period. The Valley of the Arno was Etruscan; the Valley of the Po, Gallic, Etruscan, and Liburnian; so that the northern boundary of the more western of the two classical languages was the Tiber, and that of the most eastern one the Ambracian Gulf—for farther than this it is not safe to carry Ancient Greece. Perhaps it cannot be carried so far.

Be this, however, as it may, the scholar who recognises the fundamental affinity between the Greek and Latin languages, and at the same time requires either an original geographical continuity or a series of migrations to account for it, has a vast mass of difficulties to deal with: and I cannot think that these have ever been fairly met. The intervening area which lies between the Hellenes and Italians is of no ordinary magnitude. It is not only larger than either Greece or Italy separately, but larger than both put together. It is this if we give it the most favourable conditions imaginable. It is this if we suppose that, on the head of the Adriatic Gulf, there existed in early times a population from which the Italians on one side, and the Greeks on the other, are descended—at the head of the Adriatic Gulf, and no where else.

I limit this hypothetical population to a small area, because, as no trace of its existence can be found, the smaller it is supposed to have been, the more easily its extinction is accounted for; and I place it in a locality equidistant to Greece and Italy, because, by so doing, the amount of its extension is diminished. The more distant we make it, the more improbable that extension becomes; and the larger it is, the more improbable its disappearance. I have put it, then, under the most favourable conditions. Yet, even here, its position is eminently doubtful. The first nations which we meet with in these quarters are the Liburnians; and few have a less claim to be considered either Greek or Italian, or, yet, intermediate to the two.

The bolder doctrine is the assumption of what has been called The Thraco-Pelasgic stock. This maintains that the extinct populations and languages of Thrace, Mœsia, and Pannonia were intermediate to those of the two peninsulas, and that, by a sort of divarication, the western extension of their southern members peopled Italy, and the eastern, Greece. This view has the advantage of being difficult to refute—since it is the current belief that the original languages of the three countries in question are extinct, and that, as nothing is known about them, it is as easy to say that they were the mother tongues of the Greek and Latin as aught else. The assumed displacements, however, are enormous; besides which, the ancient Thracians must have been more Greek than were the ancient Italians; which is unlikely.

But the great difficulty in fixing a locality for this Thraco-Pelasgic, or Helleno-Latin language (call it what we will) lies in a reason which the reader of the first chapter of this book may, perhaps, anticipate. It lies in the existence of the Albanian language; a fact, which I said, on the onset, was one of such importance as to require being treated as a special and separate preliminary to the ethnology of Greece and Italy, as well as on its own merits. Whence came this remarkable tongue, and whence the populations who speak it? For a long time both were considered recent introductions,—introductions from Caucasus, perhaps, or from some other locality equally plausible. But this origin is no longer admitted by any competent investigator; and the modern Skipetar, or Albanians, are now looked upon as the descendants of the ancient Illyrians, and of such Epirots as were not truly Greek. So that the Thraco-Pelasgic hypothesis is materially weakened by the inconvenient locality, and the impracticable antiquity of this nation. So awkwardly does it lie, that it fills up full two-thirds of the area required for the hypothetical tongue in question.

Hence the line of such transitional populations as, by connecting Greece and Italy, account for the ethnological affinities of their respective occupants, must not be a straight one. On the contrary, it must trend round the Albanian country, viâ Macedon, Thrace, Servia, Croatia, and Carniola.

The assumption of a stream of population from Asia Minor across Turkey, Servia, and the parts to the north of the Adriatic is the Thraco-Pelasgian doctrine modified; since it deduces both tongues from a common source.