3. An Hellenic dynasty of Perseids, belonging to the Greek Peninsula, follows this dynasty; and, effacing the trace of foreign rule, governs its subjects under the Argeian or Argive name; which, without reviving the title of the Pelasgi, a word now becoming or become subordinate, yet like that title is founded on the physical character of the regions in which the population was settled, and upon the employments suited thereto.
4. Next appears upon the scene the Achæan name, which bears no mark of relationship to the soil, or to any particular employment, or to any particular eponymist, but appears to be the designation of a race, not indeed foreign, yet new to the Peloponnesus.
5. A warlike and highly gifted race gradually pervade different parts of Greece under this name: the Pelopids, its ruling family, possessing themselves of the throne of the Perseids, attain, perhaps through the extended sympathy of Achæan blood, to a national supremacy. The Achæans are, in fact, become the Greeks of the Troic age. They include Æolids and Æacids, Argives, Bœotians, Ætolians, Epeans, Abantes, Dorians, Arcadians, Ionians, and all the other local tribes, as well as the mass of old Pelasgians, who constitute the working population (so to speak) of the country; some of them by virtue of blood, and the rest by that political union, in which the Achæans had an undisputed ascendancy.
6. All the characteristics of this race, social and religious, and its close geographical proximity to, if not indeed its identity with, the first-named or Myrmidon Hellenes of Homer, appear to derive it from the North, to dissociate it from the Pelasgic, and to unite it with the Hellic stock.
7. Time passes on; we lose the guiding hand of Homer; but universal tradition assures us that the Dorians, emerging, like those who had preceded them, from the cradle of the nation, lead another and the last great Hellenic migration southward; the Pelopids are driven from the throne of that which may be termed the metropolitan region of Greece; they migrate to an inferior seat, with their followers, and become the obscure heads of a secondary State: and the name of Hellenes, belonging to all the great Greek tribes in common, whether of Achæan, Æolid, or Dorian blood or connection, becomes the grand historical designation of the nation at large.
8. After perhaps eight hundred years of fame and freedom for Hellas, the iron hand of Roman power descends upon her at a time when the old Achæan name has revived by means of a democratic confederacy, and has once more overspread[758] the Peloponnesus. From this time, Hellas takes her place in history only as a minor portion of the Roman empire, even while, by an inward process, she is asserting her intellectual supremacy[759], and moulding the literature and philosophy of her conquerors. But to them politically she is no more than an appendage of the Magna Græcia, whose glory it is to be a part of imperial Italy, and whose name the land of Homer’s song must now assume in virtue of a double relationship; the first, that of their common social base, the old Pelasgi, of whom the Greeks (Γραïκοὶ) were probably a part; and the second, that of a more recent colonization. Thus the Graic or Greek name, having existed, but never having emerged to what may be called visibility in Hellas, travels round to it again by the route of Italy, and finally becomes predominant in this its earliest seat.
Of this intermixture and succession of names dependent on the fusion of races, and on political supremacy, we have sufficient example in our own island. It has been inhabited by Britons, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans. All came more or less as conquerors, one following upon the other. But two names only have left their mark, Britons and Angles: all the others, including the last or Norman conquerors, are submerged. So it has been with the succession of Pelasgians, Achæans, Hellenes, Greeks. Each of these names historically superseded the one before it. Apart from them, by the high privilege of Poetry, stand their names in another combination: the Iliad and Odyssey shew us Danaans, Argeians, and Achæans, as in the main synonymous before Troy: yet each with its own leaning, which makes Δαναοὶ most properly and by preference ‘the soldiery,’ Ἀργεῖοι, ‘the masses,’ and Ἀχαιοὶ, ‘the chiefs.’
It still remains to observe the immediately subsequent literary history of these three great appellatives, which the fiat of Homer made so famous.
Hesiod and the minor Greek poets afford us the only satisfactory illustration of actual usage, because the tragedians may probably have sought, in treating heroic subjects, to employ the nomenclature of the heroic age. The other poets spoke, of course, according to their own respective ages.
In Hesiod we do not find Δαναοὶ at all: Ἀργεῖος only in the singular for Juno: Ἀχαιοὶ is once used for the Greeks collectively, in a retrospective passage referring to the assembly at Aulis[760]. He uses Πανέλληνες[761] in the same poem with the same sense. An important passage of Strabo[762] testifies, that both Hesiod and Archilochus were acquainted with the use of the names Ἕλληνες and Πανέλληνες for the Greeks at large; and refers to works of theirs, now lost, by way of example as to the latter term. Both Ἕλλας and Ἕλληνες are freely used in Simonides, who also has Ἀργεῖοι for the Argives only. And generally these old writers, coming next after Hesiod, knew nothing of the use of Ἀργεῖοι, or even of Ἀχαιοὶ, for the whole nation, while the word Δαναοὶ is not found in them at all.