The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

The magnitude of the earliest historical Hellenic area is of importance. Let Greece under the leadership of Agamemnon be as truly Hellenic as Kent and Essex were Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. What does it prove in the way of the occupants being aboriginal? As little as the English character of the counties in question at the time referred to. Four centuries—or even less—of migration may easily have given us all the phenomena that occur; for the area is smaller than the kingdom of Wessex, or Northumberland, and the country but little more impracticable.

Hence, if we sufficiently recognise the smallness of the Hellenic area, no difficulties against the doctrine of an original non-Hellenic population will arise on the score of its magnitude. It was as easily convertible from non-Hellenic to Hellenic as Cumberland and Northumberland have been from British to English.

And that that area was actually very small indeed is evident to any inquirer who will take up the measure of it without any prepossessions in favour of its magnitude, and limit his Hellas to those parts only which can be shown to have been Greek; in order to do which he must draw no undue inferences in favour of the identity of the Hellenic and Phrygian languages from the negative fact of Homer saying nothing about interpreters; build nothing on the ubiquity of the Pelasgi, every one of whose migrations is as unsupported by historical evidence, as the migration of Æneas to Italy, or that of Antenor to Venice; and, lastly, satisfy himself with the “Catalogue of the Ships,” as the earliest geographical notice of ancient Greece. I think that this list is more likely to contain populations which were not Hellenic than to omit any that were; and, with the single exception of the Acarnanians, I imagine that this is the current opinion. The Acarnanians alone of all the Hellenes are said to have taken no part in the Trojan war; and on the strength of their non-intervention we hear of them some nine hundred years afterwards, putting in a claim for the good offices of the Romans, the supposed descendants of those Trojans whom the other Hellenes so cruelly conquered, and the Acarnanians so generously left alone. Yet it by no means follows that because the Acarnanians were Greeks during the Peloponnesian war, they were Greeks in the ninth century B.C., any more than it follows that because the men of Monmouth are English at the present moment they were so during the heptarchy. What should we say to the writer who, in the reign of Queen Victoria, should say that the only people of England who took no part in the wars of the Saxons against the Britons were the Cornishmen? Surely we should accuse him of an anachronism, and suggest the fact of his Cornishmen having been at the time in question, no Saxons at all, but Britons. The same reason applies to the statements concerning the Acarnanians; inasmuch as it is highly probable that they are absent from the Homeric list of Greeks, because they were other than Greek in respect to their nationality. It was only when the Greek frontier extended itself northwards that they became Hellenized. Then, too, it was that the later writers who fancied that they must always have been what they were in their own days, superadded the doctrine of their having been Hellenic to the fact of their non-appearance in the Homeric catalogue. For it must be remembered that, even in the third century B.C.—nay even at the present moment—the Acarnanians are a frontier population, in contact with the non-Hellenic Illyrians of old, and the non-Hellenic Skipetars of the nineteenth century. It must also be remembered that notice of their absence from Troy is nowhere to be found in the Homeric poems. No passage runs to the effect “that the Acarnanians alone took no share in the war under the walls of sacred Ilion, but remained ingloriously at home.” If it were so, the previous hypothesis would be futile.

Upon the whole, I think that Acarnania was in the same category with the nearly opposite island of Corcyra—Greek in the time of the historian, but not Greek in the time of the Homeric poems.

So little, however, depends upon this view of the character of the earliest Acarnanians that the notice of them is rather an episodical piece of detail, than anything affecting the general question of the size of Homeric Greece. It may have contained Acarnania, and still have been small enough for the purposes suggested, i.e., small enough to have been converted from non-Hellenic to Hellenic within a very few centuries.

On the eastern side of Greece the most northern members of the confederation are the Thessalians and Perrhæbi; but whether the latter were Hellenic is uncertain. We may admit them, however, to have been so. Macedon and Thrace were, certainly, non-Hellenic; so much so, that it is only by first peopling them with Pelasgi, and then making the Pelasgi what may be called Hellenoeid—or Greek-like—that the semblance of any close ethnological affinity with the true and undoubted Greeks of the Homeric confederacy can be obtained.

If we leave the continent and turn to the islands, the greater part of the Cyclades and Sporades are in the same predicament with Acarnania. In the “Catalogue of the Ships,” Crete, Rhodes, Syme, Carpathus, Cos, Nisuros, and the Calydnian Islands are alone named.

Such are the reasons for believing that the true and undoubted Hellenic area, was, at the time of the Homeric poems, quite small enough to have received the whole of its population from some other country, and that by means of boats and ships.

The two elements of the Hellenic population in its simplest form, are—1. The native; 2. The Italian; either of which may have been more or less mixed; though the proof of it is impracticable, and the analysis out of the question.

One of the tribes of the ancient Skipetar area was the Hylleis; and one of the Doric heroes was Hyllus. I connect these names, the latter being the eponymus to the former. When the Dorians conquer Peloponnesus, Hyllus assists them. This suggests the likelihood of those immigrants whose first settlements were on the northern side of the Saronic Gulf, and who from thence effected conquests southwards and elsewhere, having done so in alliance with certain members of the Illyrian, Epirote, or Skipetar stock. If so, the Dorian conquests were only partially Hellenic, so that there is, at least, an element of intermixture here.