In these remarks I by no means say that the resemblance is not accidental; although my opinion is against it being so. I only say that a conclusion which would have been suggested if the tribe of Dan had been Gentiles has been neglected because they were Jews.
That the alphabet and the weights and measures of Greece are Phœnician is likely enough; indeed, from the extent to which the habit of circumcision was strange to the Hellenes, the evidence is in favour of the coasts of Phœnicia, and the Philistine country having supplied a larger immigration than those of the Holy Land. In respect to the infusion itself of Semitic blood, whatever may have been the details of its origin, it was considerable; and has generally been admitted to have been so.
The absolute admixture of Thracian and Phrygian blood on the soil of Hellas, anterior to the Macedonian conquest, is a complex question.
If the Pelasgi belonged to either of these families, it was, of course, exceedingly great. But the ethnological position of the Pelasgi has yet to be considered. Even if they did not, an important question still stands over; since the influence of the Thracian bards and the Phrygian musicians, however much it has been either wholly or partially doubted by late writers, was admitted by the ancient Greeks themselves. Then there is the Trojan war, an event, which, however fabulous in its details, has some basis in fact. Lastly, there is the belief at the beginning of the historical period of the existence of Thracians in Bœotia. All, however, upon these points that is indicated at present is the caution against excluding Thracian blood from Hellas on the mere strength of its barbaric character. It is also added that, until the ethnology of Thrace has been dealt with, the evidence in favour of the Italian origin of the Greek language is incomplete.
The extent of the Hellenic area at the date of the Homeric “Catalogue of Ships,” has been given. The majority of the Ægean islands were, then, other than Greek. On the coasts, however, of Asia Minor portions of what was afterwards Ionia had been colonized. Teos, for instance, and Smyrna are mentioned by name; on the other hand, the division of the colonized portions into Æolia, Ionia, and Doris is unnoticed—probably it was unknown and non-existent. There are Dorians, however, in Crete. The Hellenes are simply a population of Thessaly, the Pelasgi allied to the Trojans, and circumscribed in area. Danaoi, Argeoi, and Achaioi are the nearest approaches to an equivalent to the subsequent term Hellenes.
From the Homeric age until the approach of the Persian war, our notices of the Hellenes are so nearly limited to the Greeks of Asia, that the state of Thessaly, Bœotia, Attica, and the Peloponnesus—European and Continental Greece—is obscure; Athens, however, and Sparta are the parts that then command notice; not Miletus, Smyrna, or Lesbos. Hellas, too, as a collective name, has been developed. On the coast of Asia there is an Æolis, a Doris, and an Ionia, all of which the Hellenes look upon as settlements from corresponding parts of Greece, and there is division of the Hellenes themselves, of considerable political importance, into two classes—the Dorian and Ionian. These differences between their own age and the Homeric, the great historians of the Golden Age of Greek literature explained as they best could. Are we bound to admit their explanation? Not for the Pelasgi, because we can get no definite doctrine at all concerning them. Nor yet, in my mind, for the Doric, Æolic, and Ionic migrations in their details. I cannot believe that the Ionic dialect ever came out of Greece; holding, that nothing but a most undue deference to authority and opinion can deduce it directly from any older form of the Attic. And this is but one objection out of many. Indeed I submit to the reader’s consideration the doctrine that the differences expressed by the terms in question, are best explained and accounted for by supposing, either—
1. A difference between the original Italian populations; or—
2. A difference in the elements which were supplied in Greece itself.
Thus—admixture and alliance with the original population of Thessaly and South Macedon, rather than with that of Epirus may have determined the Æolian character; admixture and alliance with the South Epirotes rather than the Thessalians, the Doric; Semitic elements the Ionic. In the first and last instances, there may also have been a different starting-point from Italy; the Ionians being derived from the coast that gave its name to the Ionian Sea, the Æolians from the district to which Æolus was the eponymus.
That such results as these, wearing, perhaps, the garb of paradoxes, are in strong contrast to the recognized doctrines of the best Greek historians is undoubted. No reader, however, should dismiss them until he has satisfied himself that he has discussed the question ethnologically as well as historically; until he has clearly seen the extent whereto the reasoning which the palæontological geologist applies to the antiquities of the earth’s crust (reasoning wholly independent of historical testimony) is applicable to the archæology of the human species also; and (lastly and most especially) until having fully appreciated the necessity of making the geographical and philological connections of the Latin and Greek languages coincide, he has experienced the difficulty of doing so in the face of the phenomena presented by the present distribution of the Skipetar, Dalmatian, Croatian, and other interjacent populations.