Thus Cicero, in the Tusculans, after a description of the battles of the Spartan youths, carried on not only with fists and feet, but with nails and teeth, asks, Quæ barbaria India (al. barbaries Indica) vastior atque agrestior?
We also find in Suidas the phrase Ἀργεῖοι φῶρες, and this explanation: Ἐπὶ τῶν προδήλως πονηρῶν· οἱ γὰρ Ἀργεῖοι ἐπὶ κλοπῇ κωμῳδοῦνται. Ἀριστοφάνης Ἀναγύρῳ.
No part of this play remains, so that we are left to general reasoning: but it seems a most natural explanation of this proverb or phrase, that the word Ἀργεῖος, meaning wild and savage, should be applied to banditti: theft in the early stages of society, always frequenting solitary places, as in the later ones, it rather draws to the most crowded haunts of men.
Again, Æschines, in the Περὶ Παραπρεσβείας, brings the grossest personal charges against Demosthenes, for offences, which he says had brought upon him various nicknames. Among these, he thus accuses him: Ἐκ παιδῶν δὲ ἀπαλλαττόμενος, καὶ δεκαταλάντους δίκας ἑκαστῷ τῶν ἐπιτρόπων λαγχάνων, Ἄργας ἐκλήθη. This passage is noticed by both Suidas and Hesychius under Ἀργὰς, and it is explained ὄνομα ὀφέως. A serpent, either generally or of some particular kind, had, it seems, the name of Ἀργὰς, which we can easily derive from ἄργος, taken in the same sense as that in which it became the name of Argus the spy. ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field[691].’ But this does not seem to satisfy the intention of the highly vituperative passage in Æschines. This imputation of extreme cleverness or craft would not have been perhaps a very effective one in Greece. I think he more probably means to call Demosthenes a swindler or plunderer, homo trium literarum, from whom his guardians were trying to recover, and who was likely to be exposed, not like the serpent, to get off: and in this sense the word Ἀργὰς at once attaches itself to the reported passage in Aristophanes, and through that to the old meaning of agrestis or Ἀργεῖος. Nor is Ἀργεῖος, a thief, more remote in sense from Ἀργεῖος, a rural settler, than is paganus, an idolater, from paganus, a villager.
I will take yet one more illustration, Hesychius under Ἀργεῖοι gives this explanation; ἐκ τῶν Εἱλώτων οἱ πιστευόμενοι οὕτως ἐλέγοντο, ἢ λαμπροί. Now the sense of λαμπροὶ might easily be derived from the primitive sense, in the same way as that of whiteness. But it is quite distinct from the explanation respecting that select and trusted class of Helots, who were called Ἀργεῖοι. This usage both serves to explain history, and is explained by it. Ἀργεῖοι was the name of the Greek citizen in Eastern Peloponnesus under the Perseids; it appears in part to have retained its local force throughout the period of the Pelopids; for though in the legend of Tydeus the inhabitants of Argolis we at least find the name Ἀχαιοὶ among them, yet in the Twenty-third Iliad, and in the Third Odyssey, they are called Ἀργεῖοι. In the local usage, then, the Helot meaning a serf, the emancipated Helot would be a citizen, an Ἀργεῖος. But neither serfship nor citizenship were in those days rigidly defined, and the one ran into the other. What could under such circumstances be more natural, than that any Helot who was separated from his brethren, by being taken into the confidence of his master, and living on easy terms with him, should acquire the name of Ἀργεῖος, and, that the class who had thus obtained it in a somewhat peculiar sense, that is to say, the sense of a free rural settler, or (so to speak) freeholder, should continue to bear it as descriptive of their own position, even when it had ceased to be generally applicable to the free Greeks of that particular district? which of course it could no longer be when the family and dynastic tie between Argolis and Lacedæmon came to be dissolved.
And if I am right in supposing that even in Homer[692] the name Ἀργεῖοι evidently leans towards the masses, and that of Ἀχαιοὶ towards the select few or chiefs, such a distinction is in marked harmony with the whole of this inquiry respecting the force of the former phrase.
Different extent of Ἀργεῖοι and Ἄργος.
According to the view which has been here given, we must carefully distinguish between the sense of Ἀργεῖοι, as a national name in Homer, and that of Ἄργος, in this respect. The name Ἀργεῖοι was raised to the distinction of a national name apparently in consequence of the political ascendancy of a house that reigned over territories specially named Ἄργος, and over subjects named from the region Ἀργεῖοι. I say this without undertaking to determine whether there actually was a period in which the Greeks were as a nation called Ἀργεῖοι, a supposition which seems to me improbable: or whether it was a name which Homer applied to them poetically, like the name Δαναοὶ, because it had once been the proper designation of those who held the seat of Greek supremacy. In either view, however, the case of the name Ἄργος is different. That name had not its root in political power, actual or remembered: it kept its place, as being founded in a good physical description, so far as it went, of the general character of the principal habitable parts of the peninsula which the Hellic tribes, swarming downwards from their hills, successively and gradually occupied. Hence the substantive was, as we see, capable of spreading beyond the adjective in space, since, while we have an Iasian and a Pelasgian Ἄργος, we have no Iasian or Pelasgian Ἀργεῖοι. Thus they were detached one from the other. In Homer the epithet has a larger range of clear signification than the substantive. But apart from Homer the substantive appears from etymology to have been the older, and from history either to have reached points at which the adjective never arrived, or to have long survived its desuetude.
The Achæans.
Particulars of the use of the Achæan name.