MIGRATIONS OF THE GREEKS.

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prime looked down to earth and found his gods on earth, in rock, and tree, and stream; nor did he soon forget these his first divinities. Wherefore it becomes a matter of highest importance, in testing the nature of man's belief, to find out how far his Olympus is really celestial, and how much of earthiness there is mingled with the conception of his heavenly gods.

The main influence, it has been already said, which must have shaken the Aryans loose from the chains of fetichism was the first migration from their cradle land. It has been already noticed how, before there arose a complete separation of the various nationalities-Indians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Celts, and Slavsour forefathers were first divided into two bodies; one of these comprised the ancestors of the Indians and Persians, while the second was the aggregate of those tribes which afterwards composed the nations of Europe. So that the word Indo-European will express pretty accurately these nationalities as they were known to history, if 'European' stand for the races who were in time to people Europe, and Indian' be expanded to mean Indo-Persic -that is to say, the peoples who in the end migrated to India and to Iran. That the separation of the two groups, the Indo-Persians on the one side and the European group upon the other, had preceded any more. minute separation of nationalities, is proved by the early use of distinguishing names for these two great divisions. The ancestors of the Indo-Persians claimed for themselves alone the old title Aryas, and they gave to the other body the name of Yavanas, or young ones, or otherwise the 'fighting' members of the community.' From this root we get the Javan of Scripture, the Greek Ión, Iónis, Ionian.

The people who at last migrated westward must have

Juvenis and juvare, both from the Skr. root yu, to ward off, whence Skr. yuvan, jurenis, young. In the Edicts of Asoka, 33rd cent. B.C., we have the word Yona (Ed. Princep. ii. 4) = Gr. Iafoves, laoves, Iwves.

had their settlements on the western side of the old home; and as those of the Aryas were backed against the Beloor Tagh and the Hindoo Koosh, the Yavanas would stand as a belt between this highland country and the plain or the sea in front of it. They would be the first to encounter any strange tribe whose wanderings brought them to the land of the Aryas, and to this fact no doubt they owed their name of Yavanas.

After this followed the dark period of the migrations. The Yavanas in their turn split up into two divisions. Three of the races, the Celts (probably), the Teutons, and the Slavonians, passed in succession north of the Caspian Sea and so into Europe. The remaining portion, from which were to spring the Greeks and Romans, travelled southward till they settled in the table-land of Asia Minor, where it is likely they remained for some time. It was in this central district, Phrygia, that in later historical ages there was to be found a people allied to the Hellenes by language and by many religious rites.2 Some never left this seat, and, after they had mingled with the indigenous people of the land, left behind them, in Phrygia, a race half Greek in character, and with customs and beliefs which down to late times could assert a claim of kinship to the Hellenic. Another division travelled to Europe by the Hellespont, and from this section descended the main body of the nations inhabiting the two eastern peninsulas of Europe. A third made its way to the sea coast of Asia Minor, and in that region, favourable for all development in arts and social life, they advanced rapidly in culture and far surpassed their brethren of European Greece.

Of the above divisions of race, the Phrygian people we may put out of all account. The Greek nation was

The Phrygian tongue is apparently more closely allied to the Hellenic than is the Gothic to the Middle High German (Curtius, Griech. Gesch.)

2 Especially in the worship of the ancient earth goddess, Rhea or Cybele. See next chapter.

made up of two sections-those who went round by the Hellespont and those who came down to the coast of Asia Minor. It was these last who were known to the Semitic nationalities, certainly to the Phoenicians, perhaps to the Canaanites and Israelites; it was these who were designated by the name Javan. The word Javan we may translate into Ionian. Wherefore, in calling these Asiatic Greeks (as a body) Ionians, I would not be thought to make a nicer distinction than their neighbours the Phoenicians made. It is true that the word was not understood in so wide a significance by the Greeks themselves, at least not by those of historic times. In these historic days we find the Asiatic coast divided among three Greek nationalities, only one of whom retained the ancient name of Ionians. The others called themselves Dorians and Æolians, and all three, even the Ionians, imagined themselves to have been planted there not by migrations from anterior Asia, but by colonisation from the opposite coast of European Greece. The Dorians had been planted in this way. Many even of the Ionians may have been brought, by a backward wave of migration, from the West to the East. But the name of the Ionians was far anterior to these recorded migrations: so, too, was the first settlement of Greeks on the coast of Asia Minor.

The Yavanas, or Ionians of Asia Minor, mingled with the Oriental nations whom they found there, some of whom had attained no small degree of civilisation. And the Ionians doubtless acquired many of their arts. Especially from the Phoenicians, the seafarers of those days, do they seem to have learnt the art of navigation, which was known only in an elementary form to the older Aryans. There are, common to the Indo-European family of languages, words for oar and rudder, but none for sail; and we may conclude from this that sea voyages were unattempted by the Aryas of the prime, or by the Yavanas when they formed one nation. Those of the Græco-Italicans who crossed the Hellespont could well

have accomplished that feat with only such boats as had plied upon broad rivers. But the Greeks of the Asiatic coast soon learned a higher art of navigation. Presently a great part of the people passed on, and settled upon the countless islands of the Ægæan and upon the eastern coast of European Greece. One of the Greek words for sea is quite peculiar to that language-not shared, I mean, by other Indo-European ones-and is likewise peculiarly significant. It is TóvTOS, which means literally a path. Can we doubt that the habit of looking upon the sea as a 'path,' a way, was first opened to the minds of the Greeks when they from their Phoenician neighbours had learned to make the water their road to new lands?

In the formation of the Greek nation, then, there were two elements. The earlier and ruder people, who travelled by the Hellespont, were the first to set foot on the mainland of Europe; the other body came by immigration from the coast of Asia Minor, and brought some civilisation with them, and all the elements of a higher life.

Of course this was not accomplished in a day: the passage into Greece of the men from the Asiatic coast must have been especially slow, for they had nothing to tempt them to leave the rich land in which they were. The settlers on the other side of the Egæan could have been no more than the overflow of their population. Each successive wave which came overlapping the previous one was more deeply imbued with the nascent

' Connected with the Skr. pantha, pathi and our path. It may be that there is a Teutonic name for sea from the same root, viz. the A.S. faithi (Pictet, o. c. i. 113). No nautical terms were originally common to the Greek and Italian languages, save those that are also common to the IndoEuropean family. This shows that the Greeks discovered the art of sea navigation after they had been separated from the Italian stock.

In reference to the effect of movement upon the development of belief, the decay of fetichism, &c., it is worth noticing that the very active nature of the whole Greek race is exemplified by the number of verbal roots in the Greek language.

The Latin pontus is, I believe, borrowed direct from wÓVTOS. Pons is related to pantha.

civilisation of the Asiatic Greeks, more nearly Hellenic in character as compared with the character of those who had wandered far round by the Hellespont. These last formed the Pelasgic element in Greek society.

The migrators from the Asiatic coast found people of more or less Semitic extraction settled in many of the islands, and in those parts of the eastern shore of European Greece which they first occupied. It is hardly to be supposed that the other travellers (whom we have called Pelasgians), after they had gone round by the Hellespont, found the lands into which they debouched quite bare of inhabitants. But of these earlier people we know little or nothing. They were probably a peaceful pastoral race. Their very existence had been forgotten by the men who ousted them from their homes; for, in historic days, the Greeks of Europe generally looked upon themselves as autochthones-that is to say, sprung from the earth on which they dwelt.

The later travellers from Asia, who had grown to a more complete self-consciousness and to a stronger sense of nationality than their Pelasgic brethren could feel, came later than the others had done to the European coast. When they did come, they found in European Greece a race somewhat like to themselves in language and character, but much ruder in manners, with no memory of the time when they all together left their Aryan home, but, on the contrary, deeming themselves children of the soil and firmly settled there. These people had developed a certain civilisation, marked by solid stone architecture-unless this were, as I rather suppose, the work of a still earlier race, and only adopted by the Greeks-and they had some cities. The name, Pelasgians, which they received from the new comers

Pelasgic, according to a recent derivation, which seems to me sound, is from the root of the Skr. parasja (paras far ja go), and means not, as was by the Greeks supposed, the old,' but the far wanderers.' See paper by R. Pischl, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung, vol. xx.