2 NAME AND LANGUAGE OF GREECE. 'They were the first people who had an historical literature; as perfect of its kind (though not the highest kind) as their oratory, their poetry, their sculpture, and their architecture. They were the founders of mathematics; of physics; of the inductive study of politics, so early exemplified in Aristotle; of the philosophy of human nature and life. In each they made the indispensable first steps, which are the foundation of all the rest-steps such as could only have been made by minds intrinsically capable of everything which has since been accomplished. With a religious creed eminently unfavourable to speculation, because affording a ready supernatural solution of all natural phenomena, they yet originated freedom of thought. They, the first, questioned nature and the universe by their rational faculties, and brought forth answers not suggested by any established system of priestcraft; and their free and bold spirit of speculation it was, which, surviving in its results, broke the yoke of another enthralling system of popular religion, sixteen hundred years after they had ceased to exist as a people. These things were effected in two centuries of national existence;-twenty and upwards have since elapsed, and it is sad to think how little, comparatively, has been accomplished.'-E. R. Name of Greece. The name Greece (Græcia) has come to us from the Romans, and the name Greeks also comes from the Latin word Græci. The Græci (Tpaikoi), however, were only one of the ancient tribes of Epirus (Aristot. Meteor, i. 14), and never became of any historical importance. In the Greek authors the country comprehended within the above limits is called Hellas, though Hellas was also used to denote the country of the Hellénes, wherever they might be settled, and was applied at first only to Thessaly, but afterwards to Midland Greece in contradistinction to Peloponnesus.-K. N. C. 'The name Hellas was at first used only of a small part of Thessaly (cf. Hom. Il. ii. 684); later of all Thessaly, and afterwards of all Midland Greece in contradistinction to the Peloponnesus. After the Persian war the Peloponnesus was also included in the name, and later still (after the Macedonian war), all Greece. 'The name of Achæans, strictly speaking, belonged only to a tribe of South Thessaly, where Achæus the son of Xuthus was supposed to have ruled; but in a secondary sense the name is applied to the rest of Greece, and particularly to the Peloponnesus, of which the descendants of Achæus had made themselves masters.'-P. The Language of Greece. 'The Greek language forms a branch of that extensive family of languages which are known by the name of Indo-Germanic, to which belong the Sanscrit, the Zend, the Teutonic languages, and others. The affinity which subsists between all these languages is evident, not merely from the number of words which are common to them all, but also from the similarity of their grammatical forms. The same words are used in most of these languages for the pronouns, the numerals, and the most simple of the prepositions.'-K. N. C. LITERATURE OF GREECE. co 3 It is now incontrovertibly established that most of the inhabitants of Europe, and a great number of the most ancient and civilized tribes of Asia, speak, with greater or smaller modifications, the same language, and the time may perhaps come when it will appear as probable philologically as it is certain historically, that every language in the world has sprung from one original speech. This great class of languages, extending from India to the British Isles, has been called the Sanscrit, Indo-Germanic, or Indo-European family.. The most widely-extended idiom of the Indo-Germanic family is the Sclavonian. What is of most importance with regard to the Pelasgian languages, it appears that the old inhabitants of Italy were also Pelasgians, and there is certainly no radical difference between Latin and Greek. We are led to the conclusion that these Pelasgians were simply an old or Low Iranian tribe, who formed the basis of the population in Italy and Greece. If it were necessary to fix upon some particular branch of the Low Iranian, we should be inclined to select the Sclavonian. It appears that the common or Pelasgian element of Greek and Latin was allied to the Sclavonian or Low Iranian branch of the Indo-Germanic family.'-Don. N. C. The Literature of Greece. The literature of Greece,' Colonel Mure remarks, 'classes itself almost spontaneously under six heads of periods, offering to the historian an equally apt arrangement of his subject. 'The first, or mythical period, comprises the origin and early culture of the nation and its language, with the legendary notices of those fabulous heroes and sages to whom popular belief ascribed the first advances in elegant art or science, but of whose existence or influence no authentic monuments have been preserved. The second, or poetical period, extends from the epoch of the earliest authenticated productions of Greek poetical genius, through those ages in which poetry continued to be the only cultivated branch of composition, and terminates about the 54th Olympiad (B.C. 560). The third, or Attic period, commences with the rise of the Attic drama and of prose literature, and closes with the establishment of the Macedonian ascendancy, and the consequent extinction of republican freedom of Greece. The fourth, or Alexandrian period, may be dated from the foundation of Alexandria and ends with the fall of the Græco-Egyptian empire. The fifth, or Roman period, succeeds, and extends to the foundation of Constantinople. 'The sixth, or Byzantine period, comprises the remaining ages of the decay and corruption of ancient civilization, until the final extinction of the classical Greek as a living language.' The History of Greece may be divided into the following Periods: FIRST (MYTHICAL AND LEGENDARY) PERIOD; from the Earliest times to the Migration of the Dorians, or Return of the Heraclidæ, B.C. 1104. 4 MYTHICAL PERIOD. SECOND PERIOD (NOT STRICTLY HISTORICAL); from the Migration of the Dorians till the 1st Olympiad, B.c. 776, when the authentic history of Greece commences. Periods of the authentic history of Greece, 6 in number. 'The (real) history of Greece falls most naturally into six compartments, of which the first may be looked at as a period of preparation for the five following, which exhaust the free life of collective Hellas. I. Period from 776 B.c. to 560 B.C., the accession of Peisistratus at II. From the accession of Peisistratus and Croesus to the repulse of III. From the repulse of Xerxes to the close of the Peloponnesian war and overthrow of Athens, B.C. 479-B.C. 404. IV. From the close of the Peloponnesian war to the battle of Leuktra, B.C. 404-B.C. 371. V. From the battle of Leuktra to that of Charoneia, B.C. 371B.C. 338. VI. From the battle of Charoneia to the end of the generation of Alexander, B.C. 338—B.C. 300. The five periods from Peisistratus down to the death of Alexander and of his generation, present the acts of an historical drama capable of being recounted in perspicuous succession, and connected by a sensible thread of unity. 'After the generation of Alexander, the political action of Greece becomes cramped and degraded-no longer interesting to the reader, or operative on the destinies of the future world. We may indeed name one or two incidents, especially the revolutions of Agis and Kleomenes at Sparta, which are both instructive and affecting; but as a whole, the period between 300 B.C. and the absorption of Greece by the Romans is of no interest in itself, and is only so far of value as it helps us to understand the preceding centuries. The dignity and value of the Greeks from that time forward belong to them only as individual philosophers, preceptors, astronomers, and mathematicians, literary men and critics, medical practitioners, &c. In all these respective capacities, especially in the great schools of philosophical speculation, they still constitute the light of the Roman world; though, as communities, they have lost their own orbit, and have become satellites of more powerful neighbours.'-Gr. Gr. First (Mythical and Legendary) Period; from the Earliest times to the Migration of the Dorians, or Return of the Heraclidæ, B.C. 1104. There is no more important element in the mind of Greece than the legends. They constituted the belief of the Greeks of the historical period, concerning their own past. They formed also the Grecian religion; and the religion of an early people is the groundwork of its primitive system of thought on all subjects.-E. R. MYTHS OF THE GODS AND HEROES. Myths of Chaos, Uranus, Chronos, Zeus, the Titans, Poseidon, Dionysus, Apollo, Hermes, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephæstus, Athene, and Artemis. THE SOURCES OF GREEK WRITTEN LEGEND AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS. 'There are two main sources of Grecian written legend-viz., the Indo-Collegiate theogonies, relics of which are found in the writings of Orpheus and Hesiod: 2ndly, The Homeric poems. The first are doctrinal and direct, and by their dogmatic form stand out in bold contradistinction to the second, which are purely narrative and inventive, in which, if any doctrines appear, they are rather inferential than direct. In Hesiod, the earliest systematist of the Greek theogony, we find the mythical cosmogony ranged upon a highly artificial scale, though the detail is imperfectly carried out; some portions being highly elaborated by original system, others more crudely filled up by the poet's imagination. His mythological genesis opens with a graduated scale of gods, heroes, and men. With the first, faithful to his oriental model, he has grouped monstrous yet sentient agencies, possessed of might surpassing the powers of man, yet participating in many of man's physical and mental endowments: of such a nature are the Gorgons, the Harpies, the Dragon of the Hesperides, Echidna, the seminymph and serpent, the Sphynx, the Cyclops, and the Centaurs, whose primitive type we shall notice in its proper place.'-Encyc. Metr. The Heroic Age. Myths of Prometheus, Perseus, Iapetus, Deucalion, Heracles, Theseus, Minos, and of the Argonautic Expedition. 'We are content to abandon the Argonauts, which may have been but a sort of ideal impersonation of the first rude attempts at navigation beyond the more sunny surface of the Ægean, into the dark and perilous remoter seas.'-E. R. Myths of the War of the Seven Chiefs against Thebes, and of the War of the Epigoni. THE EARLIEST INHABITANTS OF GREECE. The Pelasgi, the oldest Greek tribe with which we are acquainted, spread over the whole of Greece, as well as 6 ANTE-HELLENIC PERIOD. the islands and coasts of Asia Minor,-probably of Asiatic origin. Tradition and etymology agree in tracing the Pelasgians, so called, to the western and northern coast of Asia Minor. There is, however, little or no reason to doubt that the bulk of the race to which these 'swarthy Asiatics' belonged, entered Europe in the first instance through the wide district of Thrace, which is always mentioned as the most ancient European settlement of this tribe. For although the legends about Pelops and Lydia make it probable that they subsequently crossed over the Ægean, making settlements as they sailed along in the islands of the Archipelago, and though the etymology of their name refers to some such migration from the sunny coasts of Asia, it is nearly certain that the main body entered both Greece and Italy from the north-east. The course of their wanderings seems to have been as follows. They passed into this continent from the western side of the Euxine, and spread themselves over Thrace, Macedonia, and Epirus; then, while some of them forced their way into Greece, others, again moving on to the north-west, eventually entered Italy near the mouth of the Po. At some time, however, during the period of their settlement in Thrace, and before they had penetrated to the south of Greece, or had wandered to Italy, they appear to have crossed the Hellespont, and peopled the western coast of Asia Minor, where they founded the city of Troy, and established the kingdom of Lydia-names to which the Pelasgians in Italy and Argos looked back with mysterious reverence. There seems to be good reason for believing that the Pelasgians acquired their distinctive character-that of agriculturists and architects -in the fertile plains of Asia Minor, and under that climate which was afterwards so prolific in works of art and genius.'-Don. N. C. ANTE-HELLENIC PERIOD. 'If any man is inclined to call the unknown ante-Hellenic period of Greece by the name of Pelasgic, it is open to him to do so; but this is a name carrying with it no assured predicates, noway enlarging our insight into real history, nor enabling us to explain-what would be the real historical probleın-how or from whom the Hellens acquired that stock of dispositions, aptitudes, arts, &c., with which they begin their career. Whoever has examined the many conflicting systems respecting the Pelasgi-from the literal belief of Clavier, Larcher, and Raoul Rochette (which appears, to me at least, the most consistent way of proceeding), to the interpretative and half-incredulous processes applied by abler men, such as Niebuhr, or O. Müller, or Dr. Thirlwall-will not be displeased with my resolution to decline so insoluble a problem. No attested facts are now present to us-none were present to Herodotus and Thucydides, even in their age-on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the ante-Hellenic Pelasgians: and where such is the case, we may without impropriety apply the remark of Herodotus respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean-that 'the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism.'-Gr. Gr. |