The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

Now, if after the sketch of these numerous elements of intermixture we ask which part of Italy is most Roman, the answer gives but a small proportion of that illustrious blood. Taking the narrowest view of the question, and distinguishing the Latin area from the Oscan, Umbrian, and Etruscan, the amount is inordinately insignificant—and Rome itself was but a mixture. By generalizing, however, our language, and making Roman identical with Italian, we gain a larger area, coinciding pretty closely, though not exactly, with the States of the Church. This is the least mixed part of Italy, as well as the most Italian; the least mixed because it is south of the pre-eminently German, and north of the pre-eminently Arab area of invasion, and the most Italian, because the original basis was Umbrian, and Sabine rather than Etruscan, Gallic, Ligurian, or Œnotrian.

Piedmont, perhaps, is the next in order of comparative purity; at least, as far as modern intermixture is concerned: the oldest basis being Ligurian.

In Lombardy the elements are Umbrian, Etruscan, Gallic, Roman, Ostrogoth, and Lombard; in the Venetian territory, Umbrian, Etruscan, Gallic, Roman, Ostrogoth, Lombard, and Slavonic (Liburnian); in the kingdom of Naples, Ausonian and Œnotrian, with Greek, Arab, and Norman superadditions.

CHAPTER V.

IMPORTANCE OF CLEARNESS OF IDEA RESPECTING THE IMPORT OF THE WORD “RACE.”—THE PELASGI.—AREA OF HOMERIC GREECE.—ACARNANIA NOT HELLENIC.—THE DORIANS.—EGYPTIAN, SEMITIC, AND OTHER INFLUENCES.—HISTORICAL GREECE.—MACEDONIANS.—GREECE UNDER ROME AND BYZANTIUM.—INROADS OF BARBARIANS.—THE SLAVONIC CONQUEST.—RECENT ELEMENTS OF ADMIXTURE.

IT may safely be said that the difficult question as to the relative influences of the external effects of soil, climate, physical conditions, the admixture of foreign blood, and the introduction of foreign examples on the one side, and those of what is called race on the other, never rises to a greater degree of importance than it does in the ethnology of Ancient Greece. For, in our current language, we consider race to mean certain original differences of organization, faculties, and capacities stamped upon different divisions of the human species from the beginning; innate qualities, as distinguished from mere developments; internal elements of the original material upon which the external agencies of climate, soil, and examples act in the different degrees of its receptivity, as contrasted with the various agencies themselves; and in this current language, many writers, who would shrink from the conclusions to which the term logically leads, unconsciously indulge. I say unconsciously, because it is nearly certain that, out of ten writers who talk about race, and assign to the word a meaning essentially the same as the one just exhibited, nine would be unwilling to deny the unity of our species—unity meaning descent from the same pair. Yet between this and a system of special interpositions the advocate of the effects of race has no alternative. How can there be two original capabilities for the reception of either moral or physical influences, and the evolution of intellectual phenomena out of them, in different members of a family descended from a single pair?

All that can have had a beginning since the beginning of the species itself is the manifestation of the several capacities by outward and appreciable signs. The capacity itself must have existed from the first; and the writer who considers that too great weight is attached to external accidents, and too little to innate qualities, unless he admit either the doctrine of a multiplicity of protoplasts, or extra-natural changes in the faculties of the progenitors of certain favoured nations, when he talks about race, only throws back the evolution of the distinctive characters of the populations he may be considering to some period more or less early. If the remote ancestors of the Greeks and the remote ancestors of the Turks be referable to some common parentage, it is mere verbiage to refer the differences between them to race, as an ultimate and primary cause. It is no cause, but, itself, an effect—an effect of influences immeasurably early in their actions, but still an effect. For it is evident that of race, as it is called, there can be but three causes—original difference of parentage, preternatural changes in the faculties or organization of certain members of one common family, or the operation of the ordinary agencies of climate, nutrition, and ideas.

I neither deny nor assert that any one of these three causes is the true one. I only draw attention to a remarkably common inconsistency. A very little amount of ethnological literature will satisfy any one who makes the search that the number of writers who write about race, and who are, nevertheless, wholly unprepared for either of the first two explanations of its origin, is very great. So that they admit the third, and the third only. If so, why make so much of the distinction?

In the special question before us we are in great danger of overvaluing this undefined element; imagining that intellectual pre-eminence of the highest kind was the original endowment of a section of mankind called Hellenes. That these Hellenes were so favoured is certain, but that they were a race at all is doubtful. Unless the necessity of connecting the Latin and Greek languages in geography as well as in philology have been overvalued, and, along with it, the difficulty of doing so by any simple extension of the two areas, the natural inference from the necessary consequences of a maritime migration follows as a matter of course, viz., the probability of the blood on the mother’s side having been different from that of the father—the one Italian, the other native to the soil. If so, there is an Hellenic language, an Hellenic literature, an Hellenic influence in the world’s history. But there is no Hellenic stock. The tongue belongs to Hellas, and the blood to Italy.

Subject, then, to the correctness of the Italian hypothesis, what was the native stock of Hellas? Pelasgic. What means this? The proper place for this inquiry is the chapter on the ethnology of Turkey, for in two Turkish localities only have any Pelasgi existed within the historical period. A negative statement, however, will find place here. Whatever the Pelasgi were, they were not, at one and the same time, the earliest occupants of Hellas, and a population belonging to the same class with the Hellenes. The reasons which lie against making the Hellenes aboriginal to Greece lie also against any other Hellenoeid population.