Far more expansive than their Pelasgian antecessors, the Hellic tribes availed themselves of the great advantages which the country offers for extended navigation, which was so essential as a means both of communication, and of attracting the elements of civilization from abroad. They were apt pupils under apt instructors, the Phœnician mariners. They developed the Pelasgic religion into their more enlarged and diversified mythology: they idealized the visible world together with human nature, and established those peculiar and pervasively poetical relations between the seen and the unseen spheres of existence, which are the basis of the Greek mythology. Their keen sense of the beautiful led them to adorn both the body and the mind of man with the attributes of deity, while their imaginative power continually prompted them both to clothe celestial objects in shapes borrowed from the visible world, and to equip the gods with sentiments and passions drawn from the sphere of every day experience.
They likewise brought with them the gymnastic element of the Greek system, the education of the body; and they made provision for this education, in conjunction with a powerful means of national union, in the Games which became so famous through so many ages.
The same qualities which found employment in fashioning the relations of earth to heaven, were likewise busy in uniting the past with the present, by the agency of history in the form of song.
Of this race were the Achæans, who by their power and extension through Greece, gave to it and to its people their first famous designation, that which they bore in the Homeric times. From the same source proceeded all the Hellenes, derivatively so called, and the Myrmidons. Under the great Achæan name, understood in its special sense, are probably included with the Pelopids, the Pylians, Cephallenians, Epeans, Myrmidons, Loerians. Nor can we be certain that it did not also include those Æolid families whose power and extension subsequently impressed large portions of Greece with the Æolian name.
While imperial cares and aims, and the refinements and enjoyments, together with the stir, movement, and solicitude of life, fell to the Hellic portion of the Greek societies, and took its form from them, the Pelasgian element, though depressed below the surface, continued to live and act with vigour; it predominated in the classes which form the solid substratum of society, those on which rural industry, if not those on which mechanical pursuits depended, and from which the upper surface, when exhausted by the prolonged performance of its functions, may draw in every society successive stocks of new materials to renovate its vital forces.
While Homer himself seems to represent the unbounded wealth and fulness, and the manifold and versatile power, of the composite Greek mind, we appear to have, in the rural strains of Hesiod, if not in the unenlivened theogonic traditions ascribed to him, the just and natural exemplification of all that we might expect in a Pelasgic poet.
States especially Hellic or Pelasgic.
In later, as well as in Homeric times, the Arcadians seem in the most marked manner to have exhibited the Pelasgic aspect of the Greek mind and life: and they show it much in the same relation to the Hellic races, as that of the Saxons to the Norman chivalry. Like the Saxons, it was not in bravery that they failed: they were ἐγχεσίμωροι and ἐπιστάμενοι πολεμίζειν: but in energy and passion, and likewise in governing and organizing powers, they were beneath the competing race, and therefore they gave way: while, from their enduring and solid qualities, they were well qualified in after generations to supply the greater waste caused by a more vivid temperament and keener action in the soil above them.
Among the Spartans we find developed, in a very peculiar degree, two of the imperial elements of the Greek character. The first is that political faculty of the Hellic races, by which, as Strabo says, they preserved their ἡγεμονία from the time of Lycurgus, down to the fifth century.
And the second is, the idea of the education of the body, as an essential and main part of human training: a sentiment which to us may seem narrow, but we must remember that the Greeks kept fully in their view what we have dropped from our theories, though it may be hoped, not wholly from our practice, namely, the influence of bodily exercise and discipline in forming mental qualities and habits.