Complete Edition (Vol. 1-3)
It will be most convenient to begin with the case of the Pelasgians: and the questions we shall have to investigate will be substantially reducible to the following heads:
1. Are the Pelasgians essentially Greek?
2. If so, what is their relation to the Hellenes, and to the integral Greek nation?
3. What elements did they contribute to the formation of the composite body thus called?
4. What was their language?
5. What was the derivation of their name?
6. By what route did they come into Greece?
The direct evidence of the Homeric poems with respect to the Pelasgians is scattered and faint. It derives however material aid from various branches of tradition, partly conveyed in the Homeric poems, and partly extraneous to them, particularly religion, language, and pursuits. Evidence legitimately drawn from these latter sources, wherever it is in the nature of circumstantial proof, is far superior in authority to such literary traditions as are surrounded, at their visible source, with circumstances of uncertainty.
I. The first passage, with which we have to deal, is that portion of the Catalogue of the Greek armament, where Homer introduces us to the contingent of Achilles in the following lines:
All evidence goes to show, that Thessaly stood in a most important relation to the infant life of the Greek races; whether we consider it as the seat of many most ancient legends; as dignified by the presence of Dodona, the highest seat of religious tradition and authority to the Greeks; as connected with the two ancient names of Helli and Pelasgi: or lastly in regard to the prominence it retained even down to and during the historic age in the constitution of the Amphictyonic Council[127]. All these indications are in harmony with the course of Greek ethnological tradition.
Now the Catalogue of the Greek armament is divided into three great sections.
The first comprises Continental Greece, with the islands immediately adjacent to the coast, and lying south of Thessaly. The second consists of the Greek islands of the Ægean. The third is wholly Thessalian: and it begins with the lines which have been quoted.
What then does Homer mean us to understand by the phrase τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος in this passage? Is it
1. A mere town, or town and district, like Alos, Alope, and others which follow; or is it
2. A country comprising several or many such?
And if the latter, does it describe
1. That country only over which Peleus reigned, and which supplied the Myrmidon division; or
2. A more extended country?
First let us remark the use of the article. It is not the manner of Homer to employ the article with the proper names of places. We may be sure that it carries with it a distinctive force: as in the Trojan Catalogue he employs it to indicate a particular race or body of Pelasgians[128] apart from others. Now the distinctive force of the article here may have either or both of two bearings.
1. It may mark off the Argos of the Pelasgians from one or more other countries or places bearing the name of Argos.
2. Even independently of the epithet, the article may be rightly employed, if Argos itself be not strictly a proper name, but rather a descriptive word indicating the physical character of a given region. Thus ‘Scotland’ is strictly a proper name, ‘Lowlands’ a descriptive word of this nature: and the latter takes the article where the former does not require or even admit it. And now let us proceed to make our selection between the various alternatives before us.
Whichever of the two bearings we give to the article, it seems of itself to preclude the supposition that a mere town or single settlement can be here intended: for nowhere does Homer give the article to a name of that class.
Secondly, in almost every place where Homer speaks of an Argos, he makes it plain that he does not mean a mere town or single settlement, but a country including towns or settlements within it. The exceptions to this rule are rare. In Il. iv. 52 we have one of them, where he combines Argos with Sparta and Mycenæ, and calls all three by the name of cities. The line Il. ii. 559 probably supplies another. But in a later Section[129] the general rule will be fully illustrated.
It will also clearly appear, that the name Argos is in fact a descriptive word, not a proper name, and is nearly equivalent to our ‘Lowlands’ or to the Italian ‘campagna.’
Thirdly: in many other places of the Catalogue, Homer begins by placing in the front, as it were, the comprehensive name which overrides and includes the particular names that are to follow; and then, without any other distinctive mark than the use of the faint enclitic copulative τε, proceeds to enumerate parts included within the whole which he has previously named. Thus for instance
‘Those who held Eubœa, both Chalcis and Eretria’. … Or in the English idiom we may perhaps write more correctly, ‘Those who held Eubœa, that is to say Chalcis, and Eretria’ … and the rest.
Again,
‘Those who held channelled Laconia, abounding in wild beasts, namely, the several settlements of Pharis and Sparta,’ and the rest.
So with Arcadia, v. 603, and Ithaca, v. 631.
We may therefore consider the verse 681,
as prefatory, and I print it, accordingly, so as to mark a pause.
But, again, is it prefatory only to the division of Achilles, and is it simply the integer expressing the whole territory from which his contingent was drawn, or is it prefatory to the whole remainder of the Catalogue, ending at v. 759, and does it include all the nine territorial divisions described therein? There is no grammatical or other reason for the former alternative, while various considerations recommend the latter.
There is no sign in the poems of any connection between Achilles with his Myrmidons, or between the kingdom of his father Peleus, and any particular part of Thessaly under the name of Argos, or Pelasgic Argos. Although the division of Achilles did not embrace the whole of the Phthians[130], yet Phthia appears to be the proper description of his territory, so far as it has a collective name: and there are signs, which will be hereafter considered, that the name of Phthia itself was embraced and included within the wider range of another name.
Again, the Pelasgic name, as will be further observed, is not in Homer specially connected with the South of Thessaly, where the realm of Peleus lay, but rather with the North, the towns and settlements of which are enumerated, not in the first, but in the later paragraphs of this portion of the Catalogue.
In the invocation of the Sixteenth Book, to which reference will shortly be made, Achilles at once addresses Jupiter as Pelasgic, and as dwelling afar (τηλόθι ναίων): therefore, the special Thessalian seat of the god could not be in the dominions of Peleus.
We have observed, again, in the earlier parts of the catalogue various collective names, afterwards explained distributively, for the various contingents: but there is not one of this class of names employed for any of the Eight Divisions which follow that of Achilles. They all seem to bear the form of particular distributive enumerations, belonging to the comprehensive head of Pelasgic Argos or Thessaly.
There is also something in the obvious break in the Catalogue, signified by the words
which indicate, as it were, a completely new starting point. There is nothing else resembling them. They form the introduction to a new chapter of the lists, after a geographical transition from the islands: and there is no reason for these marked words, if Pelasgic Argos was either a mere town district, or a local sovereignty, but a very good reason, if Pelasgic Argos meant that great integral portion of the Greek territory, the vale of Thessaly, the particular parts of which the Poet was about to set forth in so much detail.
It may therefore be inferred, that the epithet Πελασγικὸν is applied by Homer to the Thessalian vale collectively, as it is contained between the mountains of Pindus to the west, Œta and Olympus to the north, Othrys to the south, and Ossa or the sea to the east. We might, without geographical error, translate the phrase τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος of the second Iliad by that name of Thessaly[131], which the country afterwards acquired: but the idea which it properly indicates to us, is, that Argos which had been settled by the Pelasgians.
It is the only geographical epithet which, applied to the name Argos, belongs to the north of Greece: and it is so applied by way of distinction and opposition to other uses of the name Argos in other parts of the poems, which we shall hereafter have to examine, namely, the Achaic and the Iasian Argos.
II. Perhaps the most solemn invocation of Jupiter as the great deity of the Greeks in the whole of the Poems is where Achilles, sending forth Patroclus to battle, prays that glory may be given him. It runs thus (Il. xvi. 233–5):
It seems not too much to say upon this remarkable passage, that it shows us, as it were, the nation pitching its first altar upon its first arrival in the country. It bears witness that those who brought the worship of Dodonæan Jupiter were Pelasgians, as well as that the spot, which they chose for the principal seat of their worship, was Dodona. For the appeal of Achilles on this occasion is evidently the most forcible that he has it in his power to make, and is addressed to the highest source of Divine power that he knew.
It has been debated, but apparently without any conclusive result, what was the site of the Dodona so famous in the after-times of Greece[132]. It seems clear, however, that it was a Dodona to the westward of Pindus, and belonging to Thesprotia or Molossia. But this plainly was not the position of the Dodona we have now before us. For in a passage of the Catalogue Homer distinctly places this Dodona in Thessaly, giving it the same epithet, δυσχείμερος, as Achilles applies to it in Il. xvi. Gouneus, he says, was followed by the Enienes and Perrhæbi,
Both the name of the Perrhæbi and that of the river Titaresius fix the Dodona of Homer in the north of Thessaly. And the character assigned to this Titaresius, so near Dodona, as a branch of Styx, ‘the mighty adjuration of the gods,’ well illustrates the close connection between that river, by which the other deities were to swear, and Jupiter, who was their chief, and was in a certain sense the administrator of justice among them. In the Odyssey, indeed, Ulysses, in his fictitious narrations to Eumæus and Penelope, represents himself as having travelled from Thesprotia to consult the oracle of Jupiter, that was delivered from a lofty oak[134]. But no presumption of nearness can be founded on this passage such as to justify our assuming the existence of a separate Dodona westward of the mountains in the Homeric age: and there was no reason why Ulysses should not represent himself as travelling through the passes of Mount Pindus[135] from the Ambracian gulf into Thessaly to learn his fate. Nor upon the other hand is there any vast difficulty in adopting the supposition which the evidence in the case suggests, that the oracle of Dodonæan Jupiter may have changed its seat before the historic age. The evidence of Homer places it in Thessaly, and Homer is, as we shall see, corroborated by Hesiod. After them, we hear nothing of a Dodona having its seat in Thessaly, but much of one on the western side of the peninsula. As in later times we find Perrhæbi and Dolopes to the westward of Pindus, whom Homer shows us only on the east, even so in the course of time the oracle may have travelled in the same direction[136]. It is highly improbable, from the manner in which the name is used, that there should have been two Greek Dodonas in the Homeric age.
However, the very passage before us indicates, that revolution had already laid its hand on this ancient seat of Greek religion. For though the Dodona of Homer was Pelasgic by its origin, its neighbourhood was now inhabited by a different race, the Selli or Helli, and these Helli were also the ὑποφῆται or ministers of the deity. While their rude and filthy habits of life mark them as probably a people of recent arrival, who had not themselves yet emerged from their highland home, and from the struggle with want and difficulty, into civilized life, still they had begun to encroach upon the Pelasgians with their inviting possessions and more settled habits, and had acquired by force or otherwise the control of the temple, though without obliterating the tradition of its Pelasgic origin. The very fact, that the Helli were at the time the ministers of Jupiter, tends to confirm the belief that the Pelasgians were those who originally established it; for how otherwise could the name of the Pelasgian race have found its way into an Hellenic invocation?
Thus, as before we found that what we term Thessaly is to Homer ‘the Argos of the Pelasgians,’ so we now find that people associated with the original and central worship of the Greek Jupiter, as having probably been the race to whom it owed its establishment.
And thus, though the Pelasgians were not politically predominant in Thessaly at the epoch of the Troica, yet Thessaly is Pelasgian Argos: though they were not possessed of the Dodonæan oracle, yet Jupiter of Dodona is Pelasgian Jupiter: two branches of testimony, the first of which exhibits them as the earliest known colonisers of the country, and the second as the reputed founders of the prime article of its religion.
We must not quit this subject without referring to the evidence of Hesiod, which, though second in importance to that of Homer, is before any other literary testimony. He refers twice to Dodona. Neither time does he appear to carry it to the westward. In one passage he connects it immediately with the Pelasgians;
In the other passage, he associates it with the Hellic name through the medium of the territorial designation Hellopia:
Thus, in exact accordance with Homer, he associates Dodona with two and only two names of race, the same two as those with which it is associated in the invocation of Achilles.
III. Next, we find in Homer a widely spread connection between Thessaly and the islands which form as it were the base of the Ægean sea.
From these islands he enumerates four contingents furnished to the Greek army:
1. From Crete, under Idomeneus (Il. ii. 645).
2. From Rhodes, under Tlepolemus (653).
3. From Syme, under Nireus (671).
4. From Nisyrus, the Calydnæ, and other minor islands, under Pheidippus and Antiphus (676).
1. As to Crete. Universal tradition connects the name of Deucalion with Thessaly. But he was the son, according to Homer, of Minos, who was the ruler or warden of Crete (Κρήτῃ ἐπίουρος, Il. xiii. 450): and he was also the father of Idomeneus, leader of the Cretans before Troy (Il. xiii. 452), and ruler over many of them (ibid.), but not, so far as appears, over the whole island.
Now Minos was not only king of all Crete, but son of Jupiter (ibid., and Od. xi. 568) by a Phœnician damsel of great note (Il. xiv. 321); we must therefore regard him, or his mother, as having come from Phœnicia into Crete. The inference would be, that Deucalion came from Crete to Thessaly, and that he, or Idomeneus his son, re-migrated to Crete. Homer does not indeed state that Deucalion was ever in Thessaly: but he indirectly supports the tradition both by placing Idomeneus in a different position in Crete from that of his grandfather Minos, and otherwise[139]. This supposition would at once reconcile the later tradition with Homer, and explain to us why the grandson of Minos only filled an inferior position.
Again, as we see that Thessaly is Pelasgic, and that the Thessalian Myrmidons are called Achæans, so likewise we find among the five nations of Crete both Pelasgians and Achæans[140]. Here, according to Strabo, Staphylus described these two races as inhabiting the plains, and Andron reported them, as also the Dorians, to have come from Thessaly: erroneously, says Strabo (x. 4., p. 476), making the mother city of the Dorians a mere colony from the Thessalians. And the ancient tradition which places the infant Jupiter in Crete (‘Jovis incunabula Creten’), concurs with the idea which the above-named facts would suggest, that the Pelasgians may have come, at least in part, from the southern islands of the Ægean.
2. As to Rhodes. Tlepolemus, its chieftain, is the son of Hercules, and of Astyochea, whom, in the course of his raids, he took from Ephyra by the river Selleeis. It is questioned which Ephyra, and which Selleeis, for of both there were several, these may have been. If they were in Thessaly[141], we have thus a line of connection established between Thessaly and Rhodes.
3. As to the contingent from Nisyrus, the Calydnæ, and Cos. Firstly, it was commanded by Pheidippus and Antiphus (678), sons of Thessalus, the son of Hercules. The connection between Hercules and Thessaly, which is agreeable to the general course of tradition, also harmonises with the most natural construction which can be put upon this passage of Homer: namely, that this Thessalus was the person who afterwards became the eponymist of Thessaly, that he was a native or inhabitant of the country, and that either he, or more probably his sons, were emigrants from it to the islands.
His name, latent for a time, may afterwards have attained to its elevation, as a means of connecting Thessaly with Hercules, when the descendants of that hero had become predominant in the South. Perhaps the appearance of the post-Homeric name ‘Doris’ may be explained in the same manner.
Secondly, Cos is described as the city of Eurypylus. This may mean a city which he had founded; or a city which was then actually under his dominion. Beyond all doubt, it indicates a very special connection of some kind between Cos and Eurypylus. Now, his name is mentioned without adjunct. Had he been a deceased founder of the city, he would probably have been called θεῖος like Thoas (Il. xiv. 230). If he was living, who was he? We have in the Iliad one very famous Eurypylus, who appears among the nine foremost of the Greek heroes (Il. vii. 167), and whose rank entitled him (xi. 818) to be called Διοτρεφής; an epithet confined, as is probable, to Kings[142]. Now although Homer allows himself, when he is dealing with secondary persons, to apply the same name to more than one individual, without always caring to discriminate between them, there is no instance in which he does this for a person of the class of Eurypylus. This probably, therefore, is the same Eurypylus, as meets us in other parts of the poem, the son of Euæmon. But from the Catalogue[143], it appears that he commanded the contingent from Ormenium in Thessaly. If then, the same person, who founded or had some special relation to Cos, was also the commander of a Thessalian force, here we have a new track of connection between Thessaly and the islands to the southward.
4. Nireus, named by Homer for his beauty alone, with his three ships from Syme, can scarcely be said to make an unit in the Greek catalogue.
With this one inconsiderable exception, we find in all the cases of island contingents a connection subsisting between them and Thessaly, and this connection not appearing to be mediate, along the line of mainland which reaches from Thessaly to within a short distance from Crete, but apparently maintained directly by the maritime route: a fact of importance in considering the probable extension and movement of the Pelasgic race, which we find existing in both regions. We know from Homer[144] that the southern islands were a common route connecting Greece with the East. There are also abundant traces of migration by the northern coast of the Ægean. Thus it is at both those gates of Greece, that we find the Pelasgian name subsisting in the time of Homer, when in the nearer vicinity of the centre of Achæan power it was already extinct.
IV. Again, I think we may trace the near connection between the Pelasgians and the Greek nation in the laudatory epithets with which the former are mentioned by Homer. We must here keep in mind on the one hand the extraordinary skill and care with which the Poet employed his epithets, and on the other hand, his never failing solicitude to exalt and adorn every thing Greek.
Homer names the Pelasgians only thrice, and each time with a laudatory epithet.
In Il. x. 429, where they form part of the Trojan camp, and again in Od. xix. 177, where they are stated to be found in Crete, they are δῖοι. Homer never applies this word except to what is preeminent in its kind: in particular, he never attaches it to any national name besides the Pelasgi, except Ἀχαιοὶ, which of itself amounts to a presumption that he regarded his countrymen as in some way standing in the same class with the Pelasgians.
In the remaining passage where he names the Pelasgians, that in the Trojan Catalogue (Il. ii. 340), he calls them ἐγχεσίμωροι. He uses this epithet in only three other places. Of itself it is laudatory, because it is connected with the proper work of heroes, the σταδίη ὑσμίνη. In one of the three places he applies it individually to two royal warriors, one Munes the husband of Briseis, and the other Epistrophus (Il. ii. 693), a warrior associated with Munes. In the second (Il. vii. 134), he gives it to the Arcadians; whom in the Catalogue (ii. 611), he has already commended as ἐπιστάμενοι πολεμίζειν. In the third passage (Od. iii. 188), he applies the epithet to the Myrmidons themselves. From each of these uses, the last especially, we may draw fresh presumptions of his high estimate of the Pelasgian name.
V. Again. In the case of a race, unless when it can be traced to an Eponymus or name-giver, the plural name precedes the singular in common use. There must be Celts before there can be a Celt, and Pelasgians before there can be a Pelasgian. The use therefore of the singular, in the names of nations, is a proof of what is established and long familiar.
For example, Homer never calls a single Greek Δαναός, nor Ἀργεῖος (though in the particular cases of Juno and of Helen he uses the singular feminine, of which more hereafter), but only Ἀχαιός; and we shall find, that this fact is not without its meaning. It is therefore worthy of note, that he uses the term Πελασγὸς in the singular. The chiefs of the Pelasgian ἐπίκουροι at Troy were Hippothous and Pulæus, (Il. ii. 843,) who were
And again, (xvii. 288),
‘The illustrious son of Lethus the Pelasgian.’ It seems uncertain, from their place in the Trojan Catalogue, whether these Pelasgians were European or Asiatic; nor is it material to which region they belonged.
VI. It is further observable, that Homer implies distinctly the existence of various tribes of Pelasgi under that same name in various and widely separated places. He says,
Strabo justly observes upon the use of the plural φῦλα in this passage as implying considerable numbers. And the words τῶν οἱ in the following line, signifying “namely those Pelasgi, who,” show that the poet found it necessary to use a distinctive mark in order that these Pelasgi might not be confounded with other Pelasgi. Again, as this is in the Trojan Catalogue, where as a matter of course no Greeks would be found, he could hardly need to distinguish them from any Pelasgi connected with the Greeks, and we may assume it as most probable that he meant thus to distinguish them from other Pelasgi out of Greece rather than in Greece. At the same time, he may have had regard to other Pelasgians of Pelasgic Argos. In that country, as we may conclude with confidence from the appellation itself, they were known to form the bulk of the population, and as we hear of no such Pelasgian mass elsewhere in Homer, he may possibly have had them particularly in his mind, when he described the Trojan Pelasgians as Pelasgians of Larissa.
Some light is also thrown upon the character and habits of nations by the epithets attached to their places of abode. Homer mentions Larissa but twice: once here, and once where he relates the death of Hippothous, τῆλ’ ἀπὸ Λαρίσσης ἐριβώλακος (Il. xvii. 301). The fertility of Larissa tends, as far as it goes, to mark the Pelasgi as a people of cultivators, having settled habits of life.
There is some difficulty, however, connected with the particular sign which Homer has employed to distinguish these Pelasgians. ‘Hippothous led the Pelasgi, those Pelasgi, I mean, who inhabit productive Larissa.’ From this it would appear that in the days of Homer, though there were many Pelasgi in various places, there was but one Larissa. And, accordingly, the name never appears within the Greece of Homer, either in the Catalogue, or elsewhere. Yet tradition hands down to us many Larissas, both in Greece and beyond it: and critics hold it to be reasonably presumed, wherever we find a Larissa, that there Pelasgi had been settled. But this name of Larissa apparently was not, and probably could not have been, thus largely employed in Homer’s time; for if it had been so, the poet’s use of the term Larissa would not have been in this case what he meant it to be, namely, distinctive. Yet the Pelasgians were even at that time apparently falling, or even fallen, into decay. How then could they have built many new cities in the subsequent ages? And, except in that way, how could the name Larissa have revived, and acquired its peculiar significance?
In six places of the Iliad we hear of a particular part of the city of Troy which was built upon a height, and in which the temple of Apollo was situated (v. 446). This affords us an example of a separate name, Πέργαμος, affixed to a separate part of a city, that part apparently being the citadel. In like manner the citadel of Argos (which stood upon an eminence) had, at a later date, a distinct name, which was Larissa[145], and was said to have been derived from a daughter of Pelasgus so called[146]. Now it may have been the general rule to call the citadels of the Pelasgian towns Larissa. If so, then we can readily understand that so long as the towns themselves, or rather, it might be, the scattered hamlets, remained, the name of the citadels would be rarely heard: but when the former fell into decay, the solid masonry which the Pelasgi used for walls and for public buildings, but which did not extend to private dwellings, would remain. Thus the citadels would naturally retain their own old name, which had been originally attached to them with reference to their fortifications. This hypothesis will fully account for the absorption of the particular and separate names of towns in the original and common name of their citadels.
Where an agricultural settlement was made upon ground, some particular spot of which afforded easy means of fortification, convenience would probably dictate the erection of a citadel for occasional retreat in time of danger, without any attempt to gather closely into one place and surround with walls the residences of the settlers: a measure which, as entailing many disadvantages, was only likely to take place under the pressure of strong necessity. Such I have presumed to have been the ordinary history of the Pelasgian Larissas. That which, while it flourished as a Pelasgian settlement, might be an Argos[147], would, perhaps, after a conquest, and the changes consequent upon it, become at last a Larissa.
But cases might arise in which the most fertile lands, lying entirely open and level, would, on the one hand, offer peculiar temptations to the spoiler, and, on the other, offer no scarped or elevated spot suitable for a separate fortification. In such a case the name ἐριβώλαξ would be best deserved, and in such a case too the probable result would be, to build a walled town including all the habitations of the colonists. This walled town would, for the very same reason as the citadels elsewhere, be itself a Larissa: and thus this Pelasgian name might be a distinctive one in the time of Homer, and yet might become a common one afterwards.
All this corresponds with the general belief on the two points, (1) that the Pelasgians dwelt, as in Attica, κωμηδὸν, and (2) that the Larissas are Pelasgian.
But moreover it is supported by particular instances. Troy, for example, had its Pergama on a lofty part of the site where it stood: and from the epithets αἰπείνη, ὀφρυόεσσα, ἠνεμόεσσα, applied to the name Ἴλιος but never to Τροίη (of course I mean when this latter word is used for the city, the only class of cases in point), it may justly be inferred that Ilus[148] built the Pergama when he migrated into the plain. But the wall surrounding the entire city was only built in the next generation, under King Laomedon, who employed Neptune and Apollo for the purpose.
Another, and perhaps more marked instance, is to be found in the case of Thebes. We know from Thucydides[149] that Bœotia was, from its openness and fertility, more liable to revolutions from successive occupancy than other parts of Greece. With this statement a passage of the Odyssey[150] is in remarkable accordance. Homer tells us that Amphion and Zethus, probably among the very earliest Hellic immigrants into Middle Greece, first settled on the site of Thebes; and, he adds specially, that they fortified it. But apparently it could not have been the usual practice of the time to surround entire cities, at least, with fortifications, because he goes on to assign the special reason for its being done in this case, namely, that, even powerful as they were, they could not hold that country, so open (εὐρύχορος, Od. xi. 265) and rich, except with the aid of walls. This would appear to be a case like the Λαρίσση ἐριβώλαξ of the seventeenth Iliad, and both alike were probably exceptions to the general rule.
I have now done with the direct notices of the Pelasgi in Homer. But we have still a considerable harvest of indirect notices to gather. Particularly, in discussing the meaning of the name Ionians, we shall hereafter find reason to suppose that Homer’s Athenians were Pelasgic: and I propose here to refer to some similar indications with respect to the Arcadians.
Like the Pelasgians, the Arcadians are, as we have seen, happy in never being mentioned without Homer’s commendation. In Il. ii. 611 they are ἐπιστάμενοι πολεμίζειν. In Il. vii. 134 they are ἐγχεσίμωροι.
In the Catalogue he also throws some light upon the habits of the Arcadians: first, by describing them as heavy armed, ἀγχιμάχηται: secondly, by stating that they had no care for maritime pursuits. In both respects their relation to the Trojans is remarkable. With the exception of the Arcadians, the epithet ἀγχιμάχηται is nowhere used except for the substantive Δάρδανοι, and the position of the Dardanians in Troas very much corresponded with that of the Arcadians in Greece. Again, the Trojans, as we know, were so entirely destitute of ships, that Paris had to build them by way of special undertaking. These resemblances tend to suggest a further likeness. As the Trojans appear to have been peculiarly given to the pursuits of peace, it is reasonable to suppose the poet had the same idea of the Arcadians. The ἀγχιμάχηται is connected with the habits of settled cultivators. A peasantry furnishes heavy infantry, while light troops are best formed from a population of less settled habits and ruder manners. And as the use of ships had much less to do with regular commerce than with piracy and war,[151] so the absence of maritime habits tends, for the heroic age, to imply a pacific character. In those days the principal purpose of easy locomotion was booty: and there was no easy locomotion for bodies of men, except by ships. Though inclosed by hills, Arcadia was a horse feeding[152], therefore relatively not a poor country. In later times it was, next to Laconia[153], the most populous province of the Peloponnesus; and even in Homer, although its political position was evidently secondary, it supplied no less than sixty ships with large crews to each[154]. All this is favourable to the tradition which gives it a Pelasgian character.
Again, the Arcadians were commanded by Agapenor the son of Ancæus[155]. He would appear not to have been an indigenous sovereign. For we learn from a speech of Nestor in the twenty-third Book[156], that games were celebrated at the burial of Amarynceus by the Epeans, in which he himself overcame in wrestling Ancæus the Pleuronian. Ancæus therefore was not an Arcadian but an Ætolian: and his son Agapenor was probably either the first Arcadian of his race, or else a stranger appointed by Agamemnon to command the Arcadians in the Trojan war. Their having ships from Agamemnon, and a chief either foreign or of non-Arcadian extraction, are facts which tend to mark the Arcadians as politically dependent, and therefore pro tanto as Pelasgian: for it cannot be doubted that whatever in Greece was Pelasgian at the epoch of the Troica, was also subordinate to some race of higher and more effective energies.
Again. It will hereafter (I think) be found that the institution of all gymnastic and martial games was Hellenic and not Pelasgic[157]. In the passage last quoted there is a very remarkable statement, that there were present at the games Epeans, Pylians, and Ætolians: that is to say, all the neighbouring tribes, except the Arcadians. Thus we have a strong presumption established that these games were not congenial to Arcadian habits: and if the same can be shown from other sources with respect to the Pelasgians, there is a strong presumption that the Arcadians were themselves Pelasgian.
Once more. In the sixth book Nestor relates, that in his youth the Pylians and Arcadians fought near the town of Pheiæ and the river Iardanos. The Arcadians were commanded by Ereuthalion, who wore the armour of Areithous. Areithous had met his death by stratagem from Lycoorgos, who appropriated the armour, and bequeathed it to his θεραπών, or companion in arms, Ereuthalion. Nestor, on the part of the Pylians, encountered Ereuthalion, and by the aid of Minerva defeated him.
From this tale it would appear, first, that Lycoorgus was king of Arcadia. His name savours of Pelasgian origin, from its relation to Λυκαών of the later tradition respecting Arcadia, and to Lycaon son of Priam, descended by the mother’s side from the Leleges; again, to Lycaon the father of Pandarus; possibly also to the inhabitants of Lycia. The allusion to his having succeeded by stratagem only, is very pointed (148),
and the terms employed appear to indicate a military inferiority: which accords with the probable relation of the Arcadians, as Pelasgi, to their Hellenic neighbours. And this again corresponds with the close of the story; in which Nestor, fighting on the part of the Pylians who were Achæan, and therefore Hellenic, conquers the Arcadian chieftain Ereuthalion (Il. vi. 132–56).
It may be remarked once for all, that this military inferiority is not to be understood as if the Pelasgi were cowards, but simply as implying that they gave way before tribes of more marked military genius or habits than themselves; as at Hastings the Saxons did before the Normans; or as the Russians did in the late war of 1854–6 before the Western armies.
Lastly, the δῖος applied to Ereuthalion (Il. v. 319), accords with the use of that epithet for the Pelasgi elsewhere.
Thus a number of indications from Homer, slight when taken separately, but more considerable when combined, and drawn from all the passages in which Homer refers to Arcadia, converge upon the supposition that the Arcadians were a Pelasgian people.
They are supported by the whole stream of later tradition; which placed Lycaon, son of Pelasgus, in Arcadia, which uniformly represented the Arcadians as autochthonic[158], and which made them competitors with the Argives for the honour of having given to the Pelasgians their original seat in the Peloponnesus.
Here too philology steps in, and lends us some small aid. The name of Προσέληνοι, which the Arcadians took to themselves, and which is assumed to mean older than the moon, appears, when so understood, to express a very forced idea: it is difficult indeed to conceive how such a name could even creep into use. But if we refer its origin to πρὸ and Σελλοὶ or Σέλληνες, it then becomes the simple indication of the historical fact we are looking for, namely, that they, a Pelasgic population, occupied Arcadia before any of the Hellic or Sellic races had come into the Peloponnesus.
From its rich pastures, Arcadia was originally well adapted for Pelasgian inhabitants. Defended by mountains, it offered, as Attica did through the poverty of its soil, an asylum to the refugees of that race, when dispossessed from other still more fertile, and perhaps also more accessible tracts of the Peloponnesus[159]. Hence it is easy to account both for its original Pelasgian character, and for the long retention of it.
We seem then to find the Arcadians of Homer (first) politically dependent, and (secondly) commanded by a foreigner, but yet (thirdly) valiant in war. It would thus appear that what they wanted was not animal or even moral courage, but the political and governing element, which is the main element in high martial talent. All this we shall find, as we already have in some degree found, to be a Pelasgian portraiture. And if it should seem to have been drawn with the aid of conjecture, let it at any rate be observed that it is supported by the Arcadian character in the historic ages. They appear from various indications to have been for many generations the Swiss of Greece: not producing great commanders, and obscure enough, until a very late date, in the political annals of the country, but abounding in the materials of a hardy soldiery, and taking service with this or that section of the Greeks as chance might dictate. For in Xenophon they boast that when any of the Greeks wanted auxiliaries (ἐπίκουροι) they came to Arcadia to obtain them: that the Lacedæmonians took them into company when they invaded Attica, and that the Thebans did the very same when they invaded Lacedæmon[160]. And Thucydides tells us that, in the Sicilian war, the Mantineans, with a portion of their brother Arcadians, fought for hire with the Athenians on one side, while another contingent from the very same State assisted the Corinthians, who had come in force to aid in the defence of Syracuse against them[161].
Two other circumstances, slight in themselves, still remain for notice.
1. It was through the authority and practice of the Romans that the name of Greeks or Graians came ultimately to supplant that of Hellenes. Out of this fact, which is the most important piece of evidence in our possession, arises the presumption, that as it was the Pelasgians who may be said to have supplied the main link between Greece and Italy, and between the Hellenic and the Roman language, the Graians could not but have been a branch or portion of that people. Now we know that the Pelasgians were cultivators of the plains. Bœotia is, as we have seen, indicated by Thucydides[162] as the richest plain[163] of Greece, and on that account among the parts most liable to the displacement of their inhabitants. It was therefore probably a plain where the Pelasgi would have settled early and in numbers: and it deserves notice, that the Catalogue[164] placing the town of Graia in Bœotia, places it where we naturally assume a large, though now, as in Thessaly, subordinate Pelasgian population to have existed.
Nor is the passage in which Aristotle notices the Γραικοὶ adverse to the belief that they were a Pelasgian race. He states that the deluge of Deucalion was in the ancient Hellas: which is the country reaching from Dodona to the Achelous (αὕτη δ’ ἐστὶν ἡ περὶ τὴν Δωδώνην καὶ τὸν Ἀχελῷον). This may include either great part, or the whole, of Thessaly: whether we understand it of the little and Thessalian Achelous, near Lamia, which was within thirty stadia of the Spercheus[165]: or of the great Achelous, which skirted the western border of that country, and whose line of tributaries was fed from the slopes of Pindus. If we understand the Dodona of Epirus, this will give a considerable range of country, all of it outside Thessaly. Aristotle proceeds to say, that there dwelt the Selli, and those then called Γραικοὶ but now Hellenes (καὶ οἱ καλούμενοι τότε μὲν Γραικοὶ νῦν δὲ Ἕλληνες). Thus he describes as Γραικοὶ those who, together with the Selli, were the inhabitants of the country that Homer calls Pelasgic Argos: so that according to him the Γραικοὶ were not Sellic: and the time, when they were thus neighbours of the Selli, was the pre-Hellenic time. This is nearly equivalent to an assertion by Aristotle that the Graians were Pelasgic, for we know of no other pre-Hellenic race in Thessaly[166].
2. In vv. 695, 6 we find that (Πύρασος) Pyrasus in Thessaly (probably deriving its name from πυρὸς wheat, grain), is described as Δήμητρος τέμενος: and it is the only ground consecrated to Ceres that Homer mentions. It is material that this should be in Thessaly, the especially Pelasgic country: for both slight notices in Homer, and much of later tradition, connect the Pelasgi in a peculiar manner with the worship of that deity. For example, Pausanias mentions a temple of Δημήτηρ Πελασγὶς[167] at Corinth even in his own time. This connection in its turn serves to confirm the character of the Pelasgi as a rural and agricultural people.
So far as this part of the evidence of Homer is concerned, it goes to this only, that with the aid of Hesiod it serves to exhibit Ceres in direct relations with two countries; both with Thessaly, and, as will now be shown, with Crete; in which also, as we know from Homer (brought down by Hesiod to a later date), the Pelasgian name still remained when it had apparently been submerged elsewhere in Greece; and in which therefore it may be inferred that the Pelasgian element was more than usually strong and durable.
In the fifth Odyssey[168] we are told that Ceres fell in love with a son of Iasus (Iasion, in Hesiod Iasios), whom she met νειῷ ἐνὶ τριπόλῳ; in what country Homer does not say, but Hesiod, repeating the story, adds it was in Crete, Κρήτης ἐν πίονι δήμῳ[169]. Thus the double connection is made good.
Over and above this, the name Iasus goes of itself to establish a Pelasgian origin.
1. Because Ἴασον Ἄργος is an old name for the Peloponnesus, or else a large portion of it; whereas the Hellenic name was, as we know, Ἀχαικὸν Ἄργος. And the Ἰασίδαι reigned in Orchomenus[170] two or three generations before the Neleids. This probably touches a period when no Hellic tribes had, as far as we know, found their way into the Peloponnesus[171], and when the dynasties even of the middle and north were, as is probable, chiefly Pelasgian.
2. Because Ἴασος[172] was the name of one of the Athenian leaders, and the Athenians were, as we shall find, manifestly Pelasgian. His father Sphelus is also the son of Boucolus, a name which will be shown to be of Pelasgic and not Hellenic character[173].
3. Because Dmetor the son of Iasus was the ruler of Cyprus at the epoch of the Troica, and that island seems to have stood in an anomalous relation of half-dependence to Agamemnon, which is best capable of explanation if we suppose it to have been inhabited by a population still retaining its Pelasgian character. To this question I shall shortly have occasion to return in a more full consideration of the case of Cyprus.
Of later tradition, there is abundance to connect Ceres with the Pelasgians: their character as tillers of the soil, and hers as the giver of grain: the worship of her at Eleusis, dating from time immemorial, and purporting to be founded upon rites different from those in vogue at a later epoch: this too taken in connection with the Pelasgian origin of Athens, and its long retention of that character. In the ancient hymn to Ceres, estranged from Jupiter and the other gods, she comes to Eleusis, and there herself founds the worship; and she announces in her tale that she was come from Crete:
I even venture to suggest it as possible that the existence of a τέμενος (or land devoted to the service of any deity) at all, affords a presumption of a Pelasgic population and institutions. For we find only three other cases of such endowments: all in places strongly marked with a Pelasgic character. One is that of the river Sperchius in Thessaly: a second that of Venus in Cyprus; and the third that of Jupiter in Gargarus[175].
The notices of the Ionians contained in Homer are faint and few: but they are in entire contradiction with the prevailing tradition.
The word Ἰάονες occurs only once in the poems, where we find the five contingents of Bœotians, Ionians, Locrians, Phthians, and Epeans, united in resisting, but ineffectually, Hector’s attack upon the ships. They are here termed ἑλκεχίτωνες[176], an epithet which is unfortunately nowhere else employed by the poet. The order in which they are named is,
1. Bœotians,
2. Ionians,
3. Locrians,
4. Phthians,
5. Epeans.
A description thus commences in three parts, of which the first is (689–91),
The second describes the leaders of the Epeans: the third of the Phthians, and these, it says, meaning apparently the Phthian force, fought in conjunction with the Bœotians, μετὰ Βοιωτῶν ἐμάχοντο (700). No Bœotian leaders are named: the absence of Oilean Ajax, who officially led the Locrians, is immediately accounted for by saying that he was with his inseparable friend, the Telamonian chief.