It will hereafter be shewn, that, like Latona and Apollo in particular, Minerva in Pagan fiction represents a disguised and solitary fragment of the true primeval tradition[216]. All such deities we may expect to find, and we do find, transmitted from the old Pelasgians into the mythologies both of Greece and Rome, or those common to Pelasgian and Hellene. We expect to find, and we do find, them worshipped both among the Greeks and among the Trojans as gods, not of this or that nation, but of the great human family. In theory, exclusive regard to the one side or the other comports far better with the idea of such deities as represent unruly passions or propensities of our nature like Mars and Venus, or Mercury; or chief physical forces like Neptune; or such as, like Juno, are the sheer product of human imagination reflected upon the world above, and have no relation to any element or part of a true theology. But the Homeric Jupiter, in so far as he is a representative of supreme power and unity, and the Pallas and Apollo of the poems by a certain moral elevation, and by various incidents of their birth or attributes, show a nobler parentage[217].
In the capacity of a traditive deity, Minerva is with perfect consistency worshipped alike among Trojans and Greeks, Hellenic and Pelasgian tribes. There is nothing strange, then, in our finding her the patroness of a Pelasgian people. The only strangeness is her being (if so she was) more specially their patroness than of any other people. The very fact that, for the purposes of the war, Homer gives her to the Greeks, might perhaps have prepared us to expect that we should find her special domicile among the Hellic portions of that nation: but it supplies no absolute and conclusive reason for such a domicile. But I close the discussion with these observations. In the first place, the Pelasgian character of the Athenians in early times is established by evidence too strong to be countervailed by any such inference as we should be warranted in drawing to a contrary effect from the special connection with Minerva. Again, it may be that the connection of both with Hercules may contain a solution of the difficulty. But lastly, if, as we shall find reason to believe, the traditive deities were the principal gods of ancient Greece, and if the entrance of the Hellic tribes brought in many new claimants upon the divine honours, it may after all seem not unreasonable that we should find, in one of the most purely Pelasgian States, the worship of this great traditive deity less obscured than elsewhere by competition with that of the invaders, and consequently in more peculiar and conspicuous honour.
An examination of the etymology of certain names in Homer will hereafter, I trust, confirm these reasonings on the Athens of the heroic age: with this exception, we may now bid adieu to the investigation of the Homeric evidence of Pelasgianism in Attica.
Post-Homeric evidence.
That evidence certainly receives much confirmation, positive and negative, from without. In the first place, though Hesiod supplies us with an Hellen, and with a Dorus and Æolus among his sons, he says not a word of an Ion; and the tradition connecting Ion with Hellen through Xuthus is of later date: probably later than Euripides, who makes Ion only the adopted son of Xuthus an Achæan[218], and the real son of Creusa, an Erectheid; with Apollo, a Hellic, but also a Pelasgian deity, for his father. Again, in the legendary times we do not hear of the Athenians as invaders and conquerors, which was the character of the Hellic tribes, but usually as themselves invaded; for example, by Eurystheus from the Peloponnesus.
In ancient tradition generally, the Athenians appear on the defensive against Bœotians[219], Cretans, or others. And the reputed Pylian and Neleid descent of the Pisistratid family is a curious illustration of the manner in which Attica was reported to have imported from abroad the most energetic elements of her own population[220], and also of the (so to speak) natural predominance of Hellic over Pelasgic blood.
Thucydides[221] informs us, that the Athenians were first among the Greeks to lay aside the custom of bearing arms, and to cultivate ease and luxury. Of this we have perhaps already had an indication in the words ἑλκεχίτωνες.
He also states that, on account of the indifferent soil[222], which offered no temptation comparable to those supplied by the more fertile portions of Greece, there was no ejection of the inhabitants from Attica by stronger claimants. Τὴν γοῦν Ἀττικὴν, ἐκ τοῦ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον διὰ τὸ λεπτογέων ἀστασίαστον οὖσαν, ἄνθρωποι ᾤκουν οἱ αὐτοὶ ἀεί. This is simply stating in another form what was usually expressed by declaring them autochthons. It is part of their Pelasgian title.
A remarkable passage in Herodotus covers the whole breadth of the ground that has here been taken; and it is important, because no doubt it expresses what that author considered to be the best of the current traditions, founded in notoriety, and what Crœsus likewise learned upon a formal inquiry, undertaken with a view to alliances in Greece, respecting the origin of the Athenians. Herodotus, like Homer, makes the Athenians Ionian; and in conformity with the construction here put upon Homer, he declares the Ionians not to be Hellenic, but to be Pelasgian[223]. The Attic people, he goes on to say, having once been Pelasgian became Hellenic[224]. According to some opinions[225], this change occurred when the Ionians came into Attica: but the evidence of Homer, I think, makes Athens Ionian at the same epoch when it is Pelasgian. I therefore construe the statement of Herodotus as signifying that the Athenians, in the course of time, received among themselves Hellenic immigrants from the more disturbed and changeful parts of Greece, and these immigrants impressed on Attica, as they had done on other states[226], the Hellenic character and name; only with the difference that, instead of a conflict, and the subjugation of the original inhabitants, there came a process of more harmonious and genial absorption, and in consequence, a development of Greek character even more remarkable for its fulness than in any other Grecian race. Even in the case of Attica, however, the Hellenic character was not finally assumed without a collision, though perhaps a local and partial one only, which ended in the ejectment of the Pelasgians. This conflict is reported to us by Herodotus from Hecatæus[227], and if we find that in it, according to the Athenian version of the story, the Pelasgians were the wrong-doers, it is probably upon the ground that the winner is always in the right: and the Athenians had the more need of a case, because their policy demanded a justification, when, under Miltiades, they followed the Pelasgians to Lemnos, and again subdued them there. Each version of the Attican quarrel contains indications of being related to the truth of the case: for the Pelasgians are made to declare, that the Athenians drove them out from the soil of which they were the prior occupants, and which they cultivated so carefully as to arouse their envy, while the Athenians alleged that when, before the days of slavery, their children went to draw water at the Nine-Springs (Ἐννεάκρουνοι), the Pelasgians of the district insulted them. What more likely than that, when the Hellenic part of the population was coercing the other portion of it into servitude, their resentment should occasionally find vent in rustic insolence to boys and maidens?
The doctrine thus propagated by Herodotus concerning Attica is even more strongly represented in Strabo as respects its Ionian character. Τὴν μὲν Ἰάδα τῇ παλαίᾳ Ἀτθίδι τὴν αὐτὴν φαμέν· καὶ γὰρ Ἴωνες ἐκαλοῦντο οἱ τότε Ἀττικοὶ, καὶ ἐκεῖθεν εἰσιν οἱ τὴν Ἀσίαν ἐποικήσαντες Ἴωνες, καὶ χρησάμενοι τῇ νῦν λεγομένῃ γλώττῃ Ἰάδι[228]. The poverty of their soil kept them, he adds, apart as of a different race (ἔθνος), and of a different speech (γλώττη).