It may aid us to comprehend the relation between Cyprus and Agamemnon, if we call to recollection the insular empire which Athens afterwards acquired.
There is another sign, which strongly tends to connect Cyprus with the Pelasgian races, especially those which belong to Asia. It is the worship of Venus, who had in that island her especial sanctuary, and who, upon her detection in the Odyssey[351], takes refuge there. In the war, she is keenly interested on the Trojan side: and the Trojan history is too plainly marked with the influence of the idea, that exalted her to Olympian rank. That Venus was known mythologically among the Hellenic tribes, we see from the lay of Demodocus. That she was worshipped among them, seems to be rendered extremely improbable by the fact, that Diomed wounds her in his ἀριστεῖα[352]. We must consider her as a peculiarly, and perhaps in Homer’s time almost exclusively Pelasgian deity; and her local abode at Paphos may be taken as a marked sign, accordingly, of the Pelasgianism of Cyprus.
We have already seen Agapenor, a stranger, placed by Agamemnon in command of the Pelasgian forces of Arcadia; and Minos, a stranger, acquire dominion over the partially, and perhaps mainly, Pelasgian population of Crete. It seems probable, that Cyprus in this too affords us a parallel. We have the following considerations to guide us in the question. First, the Pelasgians, not being a maritime, were consequently not a mercantile people. Secondly, from the description of the gift sent by Cinyres, we must understand it, on account of the preciousness of its materials and its ornaments, to have been a first rate example of the skill of the workers in metal of the period. Such things were not produced by Pelasgians; and we must, to be consistent with all the other Homeric indications, suppose this breastplate to have been of Sidonian or Phœnician workmanship. This supposition connects Cinyres himself with Phœnicia, while his people were Pelasgian. Again, on examining his name we find in it no Pelasgian characteristics; but it appears to be Asiatic, and to signify a musical instrument with strings, which was used in Asia[353]. All this makes it likely, upon Homeric presumptions, that he was a Phœnician, or a person of Phœnician connections, and that into his hands the old Pelasgic sovereignty of Minos had passed over from the Iasid family, which had reigned there shortly before the Troica.
The Homeric tradition with respect to Cinyres is supported to some extent from without[354]. Apollodorus so far agrees with it as to report, that Cinyres migrated from the neighbouring Asiatic continent into Cyprus with a body of followers, founded Paphos, and married the daughter of the king of the island. Apollodorus, Pindar, and Ovid, all treat Cinyres in a way which especially connects him with the worship of Venus, as though he had introduced it into the island; and it is observable, that the points at which we find this deity in contact with the race are all in Asia, or on the way from it, that is to say, Troas, Cyprus, and lastly, Cythera: as if it were not original to the Greeks, but engrafted, and gradually taking its hold. Sandacus was, according to Apollodorus, the father of Cinyres, and had come from Syria into Cilicia.
The process which we thus seem to see going forward in the Pelasgian countries, and which was probably further exemplified in the Greek migrations to the coast of Asia Minor, was grounded in the natural, if we mean by the natural the ordinary, course of things. In the last century, John Wesley said, that the religious and orderly habits of his followers would make them wealthy, and that then their wealth would destroy their religion. So in all likelihood it was the peaceful habits of the Pelasgians that made their settlements attractive to the spoiler. They thus invited aggression, which their political genius and organization were not strong enough to repel; and the power of their ancient but feeble sovereignties passed over into the hands of families or tribes more capable of permanently retaining it, and of wielding it with vigour and effect.
Negative argument from Homer.
I must not, however, pass from the subject of Homeric testimony respecting the Pelasgi, without adverting to one important negative part of it.
It must be observed, that, as anterior to the three appellatives which he ordinarily applies to the Greeks of the Trojan war collectively, Homer uses no name whatever other than the Pelasgic, which is not of limited and local application. Neither Ἀχαιοὶ, Ἀργεῖοι, nor Δαναοὶ, bear any one sign of being the proper designation of the original settlers and inhabitants of all Greece: and if the name for them be not Πελασγοὶ, there certainly is no other name whatever which can compete for the honour, none which has the same marks at once of great antiquity, and of covering a wide range of the country. And if, as I trust, it shall hereafter be shown, that all these came from abroad as strangers into a country already occupied, there then will be a presumption of no mean force arising even out of this negative, to the effect that the Pelasgians were the original base of the Greek nation, while we are also entitled to affirm, upon the evidence of Homer, that their race extended beyond the limits of Greece.
Such is the supposition upon which we already begin to find that the testimony of the poems as a whole appears to converge. It is, I grant, indirect, and fragmentary, and much of it conjectural; we may greatly enlarge its quantity from sources not yet opened: but I wish to direct particular attention to its unity and harmony, to the multitude of indications which, though separate and individually slight, all coincide with the theory that the Pelasgi supplied the substratum of the Greek population subsisting under dominant Hellic influences; and to the fact, I would almost venture to add, that they can coincide with nothing else.
The Pelasgians; post-Homeric evidence.