THE MIGRATIONS OF THE HELLENIC TRIBES

These preliminary remarks have seemed necessary in order to distinguish Hellenic religion from the general concept of religion. When one thinks of it, one commonly has in mind a world of wholly individual figures standing side by side in belief and cult—Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Athena, Demeter, Dionysos, and so forth—and at the same time the myths that are told of them all. Few pause to consider how strange this plurality is, or how men came to believe in all of them. Almost all of these gods already appear in the Homeric epic; yet there we learn far more about myths than about cult and religion. From the time in which we can gain some real knowledge of life from written and monumental evidence, the Iliad is separated by centuries, for we do not reach that point until the sixth century; and even if it is a widespread and very natural error to equate the Homeric gods with those of the Solonian age or of still later times, a little reflection suffices to show that it is an error which blocks all historical understanding.

How, then, are we to begin to comprehend the coming-into-being of this world of gods as it stands before us in Homer and then in historically graspable times—something that can, at best, be asserted only from the beginning of the sixth century onward? At that time the Hellenic nation, scattered widely along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, is conscious of the unity of its blood and its faith, a unity that also includes moral demands and obligations to νόμοι κοινοὶ Ἑλλάδος; yet it is divided into a great number of independent leagues, cities, and tribes. Corresponding to this is the diversity of religious services, since each community orders them independently. In none of them are all the gods ordained worship by the state, and the relative valuation of the individual deities differs even more widely. Only a few sanctuaries receive recognition from other States and citizens; these are therefore called Panhellenic. Some have founded offshoot sanctuaries here and there. Subdivisions of the states, and many families, possess their own particular gods and cults. Anyone who feels the need may erect an altar to his god—even on consecrated ground—upon which others too may offer sacrifice. Nor are the cults of foreigners prohibited when they have been admitted to the country; not infrequently they draw citizens into participation, so that in the end they may become received among the state cults. Alongside all of this, there exists everywhere a mythology embracing the entire Hellenic society of gods, bound up with the scarcely less valued sagas of the heroes; gods and heroes and their stories begin to be represented by art, above all by painting. The foundation of this mythology is the Homeric–Hesiodic epic, but poetic creation has never come to a standstill. Poets are enlisted for divine service and exert a powerful influence on morality and religion, so that not only mythology remains in constant flux, but religion too receives new impulses in the most varied directions. Cult, mythology, and religion touch one another and act upon one another, but they by no means coincide. Mythology tells of gods who nowhere exist for religion, and scarcely anywhere for cult; and cult everywhere extends also to divinities of whom the poets know nothing. From these extraordinarily complex conditions to set out and reason backwards analytically is wholly impracticable.

To begin with Homer, as was customary in antiquity and has often remained so, has led only to the recognition of the deep gulf that separates his mythology from the belief and cult of the times known to us. Only another path seems practicable. However little we know of the millennium of Greek history that lies before 600, and however fragmentary everything is, the decisive stages are nevertheless given by the stratification of the Hellenic tribes, which already lies complete before 600. Here dialects provide our primary guidance; in this matter grammar takes the lead. Further, from the whole millennium that lies between the first settlement of Hellenes in the Peloponnese and Solon there survive monumental testimonies—sacred and profane precincts and buildings, objects of cult, images of gods and votive offerings, graves and their furnishings. Here archaeology takes the lead. Historical tradition is embedded in heroic saga, both in the statements of the poets and in local tradition, which among the scholars of antiquity has been better preserved than among historians. What is required here is careful discrimination and a historical-critical interpretation of the evidence, such as O. Müller began at once with his dissertation. Whoever disdains to follow his paths and substitutes his own phantasms for the discarded “legend” may proclaim how things ought to have been, but he cannot say how they were, because he does not wish to learn. From this it follows that scarcely anyone is able to draw upon and exploit all these testimonies with independent, expert judgment; synthesis therefore always remains imperfect and is uncomfortable for anyone accustomed to analysis of fully understood individual phenomena. Yet here the venture must be made. Apart from the errors that arise from one’s own inadequacy, the progress of our knowledge advances so rapidly through new discoveries, so much new material is being won in so many places by excavations and leads to conclusions that reach further than the discoverers themselves can at once draw, that every synthesis is outdated before it comes to light—and yet it must be attempted. For the division of periods, as it presses itself upon us here for the history of religion, cannot be achieved otherwise; and if for other sides of life it turns out somewhat differently and is named differently, this yields no contradictions, but only supplements and enriches the drawing of the same picture.

The proto-Hellenic religion belongs to the Hellenes who still dwell in the interior of the Balkan peninsula; it can be reconstructed only by inference from the oldest discernible state. Their immigration brings them into contact with the older population of what later became Hellas and with Crete. From there they receive the strongest influence and rise to a first flowering of power and culture. This is the Mycenaean age. Art history can set it apart as something distinct, but in the spiritual and religious sphere this is not possible. Here one can attempt only a separation of what is foreign from what the immigrants themselves brought with them—on the one hand those who in the Mycenaean age attained a high level of culture, on the other those who destroyed this culture, began anew, and slowly produced that Hellenism which, until the recovery of the treasures hidden in the earth, was the only one known to us. The geometric period of archaeology must therefore be taken into account. It had always stood in contrast to the world and art of Homer; why this is so has only now become intelligible. The epic belongs to the emigrants who, driven out by new tribes, preserved in Asia the memories of their happy former age, while at the same time receiving the strongest impulses from the peoples of their new homeland. This runs parallel to the self-contained life of the mother country, until, with and through the epic, the new spiritual and material culture that had grown up in Asia crosses the sea and even brings with it new Asiatic gods. From the conjunction of the two cultures arises what we see as panhellenic about 600; a complete reconciliation was never achieved.

If, therefore, inferences about the primordial religion with its oldest gods can be drawn only by first separating out the foreign gods, then everything must be excluded that the emigrants in Asia first adopted and worked over. What is at issue, then, is a state of affairs which indeed outlasts the time of the poets of the Iliad, but may nevertheless be called pre-Homeric in so far as the gods of the epic are not yet determinative, and in part not yet present at all. After that, the religion of the Hellenes in Asia must be treated on its own, and may be called Homeric. As this penetrates into the mother country—which also, from its own resources, heightened what was Old-Hellenic—Hellenism ripens into the many-formed whole that stands before us about 600. Yet the oppositions within this Hellenism are not reconciled; they ultimately reduce to Doric versus Ionic, and lead to the collapse of the political power of the Hellenes. There was indeed never a specifically Ionic or Doric religion; nevertheless, here too an understanding of historical development is bound up with distinguishing the tribes as they immigrate successively and afterwards move on further to East and West. However little can be said in detail—especially at this point—an overview must nonetheless be prefixed, before the religion can be followed through the periods that have now been indicated.

Up to the end of the third millennium B.C., the Hellenic tribes were still settled north of what was to become Hellas, in the interior of the Balkan peninsula. This constitutes the first period of Greek language and religion; for whatever may have existed in the age before the separation of the Proto-Hellenes from the Indo-European people must, despite its importance, remain undiscussed—although even then individual divine names, and still more certainly related conceptions, were already present that later produced divine exponents.¹

There then follows the age of migrations, coming in several distinguishable waves, which carried the tribes southward into the peninsula where their distribution among the individual regions gradually took shape, as it is found in the eighth, and probably already in the ninth, century. The Hellenes adopted from others in the cults of their gods moreso than in their external forms of life; and precisely among the circle of deities that later includes the most important figures, fully half are already non-Greek in name. For even in their earliest settlements they had lived in exchange with Indo-European tribes of their neighbourhood, some of which can scarcely be distinguished with certainty from the Proto-Hellenes themselves.

It must therefore be attempted to separate out all the foreign elements from Hellenic belief in order to arrive at what constituted its common foundation—although little help can be expected from the other peoples, since we know little of them all, and of some nothing at all. Hence it is an obvious absurdity when people so presumptuously speak of racial purity, wherever a trace of aristocratic arrogance lurks in the background.² Racial purity exists neither among men nor among gods; but the Hellenes succeeded in Hellenising a great many foreigners, both men and gods. These, too, must be treated as Hellenic, even when it proves possible to establish their foreign origin.

In the north of the Balkan peninsula the neighbours of the Hellenes were two peoples who, like the Hellenes themselves, were divided into numerous tribes. We call them Illyrians and Thracians. Neither ever succeeded in forming a unity, and both remained inaccessible to Hellenisation. The Illyrians extended far down the western side of the peninsula and reached strongly across into Italy—northwards as far as Verona, southwards as far as Croton. They cannot be securely distinguished from the tribes of Epirus, the “mainland” (ἤπειρος), as it was called by the Greeks of Kerkyra, which was originally entirely Illyrian, even if the Epirotes were later superficially Hellenised; Strabo counts them among the barbarians, which of course does not in itself decide their ethnic affiliation. The wild tribes who later took up the ancient name of the Aetolians will likewise belong to the Epirotes.

Intermixture of Illyrians can also be detected among Hellenic emigrants, and that Hellenes were at one time driven out of Epirus is shown by the Hellenic enclave of Dodona.³ Athamanians are found in Epirus, southern Thessaly, and by Lake Kopais—of what race, who can say? And when the now Aeolian dependants of the Thessalians are called Penestai, the name sounds so Illyrian that it has been conjectured to preserve the memory of a tribe that once forced its way in. The Greeks, too, in more recent times have Hellenised Albanians with particular success; indeed, a striking number of the leaders in their wars of liberation were of Albanian blood. We know next to nothing about the ancient Illyrians, and of their gods virtually nothing. It cannot be said that the Hellenes owed them anything.

Quite otherwise with the Thracians, Θρά(σ)ιχες, Θρέιχες. Under this Hellenic name we comprehend all the tribes who occupied the entire north-eastern part of the peninsula, from Chalkidike—or even from Olympus—as far as, and beyond, the Danube, at the risk of proceeding too hastily. Already in the second millennium Thracian tribes crossed the Hellespont; as Phrygians they destroyed the Hittite empire and attained dominion over inner Asia. As Bebryces they are seated near Kyzikos, as Briges in the Balkans, but they disappeared early. The Troad became Thracian, yet the Dardanians known to Homer share their name with a supposedly Illyrian tribe. Then came the Mysians, at so late a date that they displaced Hellenic settlers, and later the Bithynians, who were rapidly Hellenised.

In Hellas itself there is knowledge of Thracians east of Parnassus,⁴ and in Megara together with Eleusis; this tradition has been disputed in vain.⁵ The islands off of the European coast were Thracian, or became so, until they passed into the permanent possession of the Hellenes; nor are secure traces of an earlier Carian settlement lacking. Thracian religion presents an ambivalent impression. On the one hand we encounter gods closely related to the Hellenic, so that they can bear the names Artemis and Hermes; alongside these stand orgiastic cults, in Europe as well as in Asia, which, through the Greek adoption of Dionysos-Bakchos, profoundly transformed the entire religious sensibility of the Hellenes. A Sabos Sabazios, already possessing adherents in Athens in the fifth century, continues to be worshipped in the Imperial period. In Thrace itself the principal god at that time is the mounted Heros, demonstrably ancient, whose name among the Hellenes originally denotes the noble lord.⁶ Alongside this there attaches itself a belief of quite different orientation to the prophet Zamolxis—a kind of doctrine of immortality and of human apotheosis—which exercised no influence upon the Hellenes. Since archaeological research is now being vigorously pursued in Bulgaria, important discoveries may be hoped for, provided it proves possible to penetrate back into the early period. A clear separation of the Thracian and Getic tribes is especially desirable.

The pressure of Illyrians and Thracians drove the Hellenes southwards, eastwards down the river-valleys to the Thermaic Gulf and then across the mountains. The people upon whom they encountered were called Pierians and were regarded as Thracians, but the mountain at whose foot they dwelt bears the name Olympus, which recurs in Asia and evidently belonged to the people who once possessed all Hellas, before yielding to the Thracians. In historical times Macedonia is inhabited by the Macedonians, kinsmen of the Hellenes; that pure Hellenes once sat there is guaranteed only by the memory of those who emigrated to Asia, for their epic made the Pierian Olympus the seat of Zeus with his children and with the Muses, and thus brought it into general recognition. The mountain-chain that separates Thessaly from the sea was likewise occupied by Perrhaebians and Magnetes, who, like the Macedonians, can be regarded only as kinsmen of the Hellenes⁷; they were early subdued by the Hellenes, so far as they did not emigrate, and adopted their language.

The settlement of what was later Hellas naturally took place in many individual stages, and again and again new tribes pressed in from the north; but we cannot go back further than to a possession that already embraced the Peloponnese, at least its eastern side as far as the mouth of the Eurotas. In historical memory only the last great immigration of the Dorians has remained, which may have fallen in the very latest period of the second millennium. Tribes untouched by it—the Arcadians and the Athenians—laid claim to being autochthonous. The same idea lies behind the notion that the river of a land is regarded as its ancestor; but this occurs even when the river bears a pre-Greek name, Inachos, Asopos, and thus can only have arisen once these names were no longer felt to be foreign.⁸

Against such claims Hecataeus already declared that the whole Peloponnese had once belonged to barbarians, and later criticism has rightly extended this to all Greece. The pre-Greek population has left its most important traces in the names of mountains, rivers, and settlements; certain suffixes in derivational forms have been identified, and the Greeks will have borrowed far more from this foreign language than has so far been recognised. In the mainland they usually call this people Carians or Leleges,⁹ and the recurrence of names and word-formations in Asia has shown that indeed, the same people had settled widely in Asia. The Carian name has been preserved there as that of a particular region and is beyond doubt a tribal name; but it may be permitted to use it for the whole people, who in Europe as well were divided into tribes bearing different names.¹⁰ On Oeta, non-Greek Kylikranes long survived as dependants; they are reckoned as Lydians, which can hardly indicate any real distinction from the Leleges of neighbouring Locris¹¹. That almost all the islands were occupied by Carians well into the Hellenic period is securely attested. Their dwelling-places and graves bear witness to a low level of culture, a judgement which we may safely extend to the European mainland. Here, so far as I know, it has not yet been possible to distinguish with certainty what is Carian from what is early Hellenic, and the difficulty is great, since we do not know how far Cretan culture had already affected the European Carians. In the strongholds of eastern Hellas—Orchomenos, Thebes, and above all the Argolid, that is, at sites which were inhabited and named when the Greeks arrived—the Cretan influence then predominates entirely. Along the whole west coast there is a lack of ancient cities, with the exception of Calydon; and whatever pottery is Mycenaean derives from there, not from Crete, as does likewise the construction of tholos tombs, for example near the Samos which Homeric theology continues to call Pylos. With good reason this whole culture is therefore called Mycenaean,¹² since it has been established that even the occupants of the shaft-graves were already Hellenes. The fabulous power and splendour of the Mycenaean high kings and their vassals was the reality that informed a living memory in the heroes of the Asiatic epic: the first flowering of Greece, which, however, belongs exclusively to the earliest stratum of the immigrants.

It is customary to make no distinction between the Carians, the pre-inhabitants of Greece, and the Cretans. This can scarcely be correct. The contrast in the whole of their culture sets the Cretans far above the Carians of the islands they ruled, by a margin greater than could be conceived within a single people.¹³ On the other hand, there are not a few place-names in Crete which correspond to those in Carian Asia,¹⁴ so that the explanation readily suggests itself that the island once possessed the same population as the islands, Hellas, and large parts of Asia—especially since Rhadamanthys¹⁵ and Hyakinthos (Cretan Βάχινθος) are themselves Carian names. That the “true Cretans” long maintained themselves in the eastern part of the great island is secured by the inscriptions of Praisos.¹⁶ Were the true Cretans perhaps the population pushed back by the immigrants, while the latter were the creators of the great Cretan power and culture? The notion must, of course, be rejected that the Eteocretans were themselves immigrants, and that those of Knossos were the “true” Cretans. We have no reason to distrust the tradition which regards the Cydonians of the West as a distinct people.¹⁷

Accordingly, it is advisable to distinguish between what the Hellenic immigrants found in the land and what they adopted from Crete. We shall assume that they regarded the ancient cult-sites—whatever their original character may have been—as sacred; there they could establish their own gods, could adopt foreign ones or identify them with their own, as they later did everywhere and at all times: this must in each case be examined separately. They encountered a superior culture only in Crete, and their princes surrendered themselves to it completely; meanwhile the lower population could persist in its entire way of life at a very low level, and still more so the enslaved native population. The mighty walls, which later generations believed to be the work of giants, can only have been erected through the corvée labour of an unfree multitude, like the pyramids of Egypt. In Crete the princes dwelt in vast palaces, and the cities could dispense with any fortification; thus a powerful fleet must have protected the internally pacified island and exercised that maritime dominion which lived on in memory and remained associated with the name of Minos. Its traces have not vanished even from the islands.¹⁸

How, then, are we to explain that the Hellenes remained independent and powerful, yet wholly submitted to the luxuriant culture of Crete? Here too we infer the existence of a sea-power capable of matching the Cretan. There was no lack of Viking-like expeditions by the Mycenaeans, but while they could bring home booty and captives, they could not thereby effect the adoption of arts and customs. Commercial relations are likewise insufficient as an explanation: they had nothing to export in return for the masses of gold that were exchanged.¹⁹ The armies and princes of the Argolid must themselves have been on Crete. The repeatedly drawn conclusion is therefore compelling: the destruction of the older palace of Knossos was brought about by a temporarily successful Greek invasion, which on this occasion was still repelled; this was followed by a period of lively peaceful intercourse, and as the over-ripe Cretan culture declined of its own accord, Cretan craftsmen and artists also moved to places where they found employment in the Argolid and in Boeotia. We perceive this only in what could be preserved in the earth, but we must generalize from it. At individual points on the great island, Hellenic intruders will also have established themselves: Idomeneus²⁰ and Meriones fight under Agamemnon. Thus there was a close contact between two peoples fundamentally different in race, spiritual disposition, and outward culture—a relationship that may well be compared with that between Romans and Germans in the period of the Migration of Peoples.

To pursue this parallel is instructive in general. We know the ancient Hellenic kingship from the Epirotes and Macedonians: it is anything but patriarchal and absolute, for it rests upon the oath of loyalty which prince and people—that is, the host in arms—swear to one another. The king is therefore an official of his state, even when divine descent entitles him to his position. Alongside this stand tribes without kings—Phocians, Locrians, Aetolians—just as among the Germans in their earliest period. In critical times and for a military expedition one chooses a leader, whom several tribes follow; this has been preserved among the ταγοί of the Thessalians. Naturally, strong kings also subjugate several tribes, as the Macedonians did. The Goths acted in the same way, under princes such as Fritigern and Alaric, and earlier still under Maroboduus. Theodoric, however, rules at Ravenna on Roman soil over Goths and Romans alike, increasingly in Roman fashion. In just the same way Hellenic princes established themselves at Thebes and Mycenae in ancient cities, which they were the first to turn into fortified strongholds. Other princes were their vassals; such a situation once existed in Macedonia as well. An echo of this survives in the position of King Agamemnon in the Iliad, who, as commander of the expedition, has many kings beneath him²¹. The vassal relationship only glimmers through here and there; for most it does not apply, and was later replaced by the oath of the suitors of Helen. What was decisive was always the tribe, which developed into the polis, the state, yet formally always wished to remain a tribe, as its internal organization shows.²² And the king was the head of the lineage, as our very word König still implies, but the born leader of free men: ἄρχειν is to go before.

Of the political, social, and economic conditions upon which the power and splendour of the lords—especially in the Argolid—rested, we shall scarcely ever be able to form even a rudimentary conception. Brief, at any rate, this heroic age, as we may call it, cannot have been. The construction of permanent roads and bridges in the environs of Mycenae, the drainage tunnels of the Copais, signify achievements beyond anything the Greeks later carried out. We are overwhelmed by the furnishings and adornment of the palaces and tombs, by the Cyclopean walls; in these, much is Cretan, but the layout of the houses and the Cyclopean masonry are northern—Hellenic—and so too are many elements of the armament. How far, then, did foreign influence extend in the realm of the spirit? Whoever assumes that the subjected population was of the same race and language as the Cretans will rate its influence highly; but this is unproven, and I cannot believe it. If, on the other hand, the Cretans were a wholly foreign people, and thus earlier at least predominantly hostile, the matter presents itself differently. Weapons and ornaments, painting and household furnishings can be adopted without men thereby becoming inwardly different. One could summon the acrobats with their bulls just as one summoned the painters; that the more manly delight in war and the hunt did not wither, as it had among the decadent Knossians, is shown by the monuments. The Mycenaeans did not learn writing²³; they did submit to shaving, and wished to be refined and fashionable as well. Thus I am little inclined to believe in a strong spiritual influence of the foreign religion, which is by no means necessarily given with the adoption of implements and external forms of cult. The tomb architecture—and all that follows from it for funerary cult and belief—far surpasses the Cretan. Already the layout that sacralised the shaft graves, and the Treasury of Atreus in its proportions and artistic conception, constitute a complete revelation of the most genuine and noblest Hellenism. Here there is measure and harmony—precisely what the Cretans lack.

The comparison with Theodoric at Ravenna and Geiseric at Carthage is apt; yet the Cretan gods cannot be compared with the power of Christianity, which in a sense inherited the destroyed Roman state by the Church. Accordingly, later treatment will show that it was precisely through engagement with scholars of a different persuasion that I arrived at the conviction not to rate the Cretan influence upon the Hellenic people highly. On the island itself matters were naturally otherwise: there both cults and gods endured, under their old or even under new names, and could also act upon the mainland; but this influence was not considerable. Indeed, in the decisive geometric period the connection with Crete seems strangely slight.

The entire Mycenaean culture sank beneath the surface just as completely as the Cretan; only among the emigrants in Asia did the memory survive, preserved in heroic poetry, which continued to flourish only there. In the homeland even the heroes themselves had all been forgotten and returned only through Homer. We cannot even specify the time of the catastrophe, and strikingly no memory at all has remained of the conflicts that had such a devastating outcome²⁴—despite the fact that in the expedition of the Seven against Thebes²⁵ we learn something of a war belonging to the heroic age. Whether the raid of Minos against Keos, Athens, and Megara, or the connection of Troezen with Crete, still goes back to a memory of Cretan sea-power may be more doubtful; yet I know of no other explanation. That the new Hellenic immigrants lost the memory of their victorious entry is not surprising; they also forgot everything about the immediately following centuries, just as the break in all the arts is complete and the geometric period begins entirely anew. The emigrants in Asia and their poets never tired of preserving the memory of ancient glory and ancient heroes; of the distress and shame of their expulsion they wished to say nothing.

It is entirely possible that along the Asiatic coast individual points were already occupied in the time of Mycenaean power, so that the displaced could seek refuge there; for the Hellenic colony on Cyprus was founded from the Peloponnese so early that the picture-script was adopted and not replaced by Semitic letters—that is, in the last centuries of the second millennium.²⁶ That the tradition which derives the Cypriots from Arcadia under Agapenor has proven true is of great significance. The Greek dialect that continued to be spoken permanently in certain cities of Pamphylia²⁷ also makes the legends of expeditions to the southern coast of Asia, as far as fertile Cilicia, highly credible; Aspendos and Sillyon may very well be the remnants of a far more extensive settlement that succumbed to the Hittites, or perhaps only later to the Assyrians. In Cilicia there is no lack of traces of early immigration, associated with the prophetic names Amphilochus and Mopsus.²⁸ But if such distant regions were reached, stages along the route must have been occupied; and accordingly there is no shortage of secure indications that Cos and Rhodes already had Hellenic settlers before the arrival of the Dorians. On this basis the same is in itself credible for the more northerly coast as well, although there, according to local tradition, the Cretans in Miletus and on Chios first had to be expelled.

Tradition calls this emigration the Aeolian and the Ionian. It does so because in Asia the two dialects, Aeolic and Ionic, developed into full-fledged languages, to which leagues of cities later corresponded. The Dorians of the south joined them, without their emigration being reduced to a single expedition. Thus arose the threefold division of the dialects that prevails in ancient grammar, though it by no means corresponds to the dialects of the mainland. That the region of Cynuria in the west (Herodotus 8.73) and the entire northern coast of the Peloponnese were once Ionic has never been forgotten; Troezen and Epidaurus (Pausanias II.26) as well as the western region, Aigialos—the “coast”—were so named before the name Achaea came into use. To the Ionians in the broader sense belong Attica and Euboea, but also the Γραιχή territory as far as Anthedon. Conversely, Orestes or Tisamenus is said to have migrated to Lesbos; in Cyme an ancient king is therefore named Agamemnon (Pollux IX.83). But Boeotia, too, regards itself as related to the Lesbians; and since Achilles and Jason, the principal heroes of the Aeolic–Ionic saga, come from Thessaly, the tradition leads us to the conclusion that the whole of Greece was once inhabited solely by members of these linguistic groups, who thus form the first stratum of the immigrants. This conclusion is confirmed by the evidence of the dialects. In Thessaly the old Aeolic population transmitted its language to the foreign Thessalian ruling class; in Boeotian, Aeolic elements have been preserved. The same has been shown by the earliest inscriptions from Argos. Arcadian, from which Cypriot is derived, is related both to Aeolic and to Ionic; it has left many traces in Laconian, and these are supported by other historical observations, including those drawn from cult-history, so that we may state with confidence that the three southern promontories of the peninsula were once inhabited by Arcadian tribes, and that the boundaries of Arcadia to the west and north were never fixed. One must not project the sharp differentiation of the dialects, as it developed in Asia, back into the earliest period, but must assume transitional forms in the spoken language, such as are still shown by Arcadian itself—which is by no means internally uniform—and also by Thessalian. Ionic–Aeolic may therefore be treated as a unity in contrast to the languages that emerged later: the language of the first stratum.²⁹

Corresponding to its diversity was the number of individual tribes; but if at one time almost the entire Peloponnese was brought together under the political supremacy of Mycenae (that is, of the tribe of the Danaans), then the people must also have borne a common name, and this Philipp Buttmann³⁰discovered in the Peloperi, unmistakably preserved in the name of the peninsula itself; even the formation of the word betrays a tribal name. The eponymous Pelops is accordingly, in the Iliad, the ancestor of the kings of Mycenae; no father is named for him. But alongside this residence, retained from Homer, Olympia also lays claim to him—the oldest panhellenic sanctuary—where he likewise has his hero’s tomb; and a tradition makes him ruler of the peninsula from that place. Pindar (Nem. 2.21) can describe the ravines of the Isthmus as those of Pelops, because they mark the boundaries of his island. Pelops’ father is here Tantalos; he is called a Lydian, because the emigrants carried Tantalos with them and settled him on Sipylos. But his name is transparently Greek, and he had once borne the sky like Atlas.³¹ The connection between these two names has long been recognised, and Atlas understood as the god of the mountain, in whose cave his daughter bore Hermes—the god-mountain of the Peloperi, before the epic tradition imposed Olympus upon them. It is very tempting to conclude that Πέλοπες is a shortened form of Πελασγοί or a related tribal designation. Πελασγοί would then have come out of Πελασγλοί, a weakened form next to a more brilliant original; because that αἴγλα developed out of ασγλα is certain. That the Pelasgians are everywhere and always—even in the Thessalian Pelasgiotis—a definite yet only relative tribal designation, denoting in fact or by presumption an older stratum or the aboriginal population, need not be further elaborated, however often misunderstanding has will-o’-the-wisped on the basis of Herodotus’ non-binding combinations.

The Cretan power was no longer a danger to the lords of Orchomenos, Thebes, Mycenae, and Lacedaemon. But before Hellenic tribes pressing southward in ever new waves they had to give way or submit. The Thessalians were merely the last of these; hence those who remained in the land did so as its masters, yet themselves submitted to the richer language and culture of their Aeolic subjects, like the Germans on Roman soil. Of their own they contributed nothing. The Iliad does not know them; it does know the Boeotians, their predecessors, for these had come down from Thessaly into the fertile land without lingering in the mountains before it. Coroneia, where their federal sanctuary stood, is named after the Lapith Koronos, and their federal goddess too comes from southern Thessaly. Aeolians and Ionians withdrew to the coast, across the Euripus, and onward to Asia.³² The Boeotians gradually pushed their way down to the sea and across Cithaeron toward Megara, where the Thracians disappeared beneath them, until the Dorians later wrested dominion from the Boeotians themselves.³³

Much earlier, and in far greater numbers, must those tribes have pressed into the Peloponnese who brought the splendour of the fortresses in the Argolid to an abrupt end and drove the older population overseas, so far as it did not retreat into the Arcadian highlands and to the fringes of the peninsula. To gain clarity about these invaders, it is well first to consult the Hesiodic catalogues, a portion of which, in this case, I am inclined to leave to Hesiod himself.³⁴He began with Deucalion³⁵ and Pyrrha³⁶; the father of Deucalion, Iapetus,³⁷ we may supply from the Theogony: he is a Titan, so that mankind here derives from the primeval powers, Heaven and Earth. But Pyrrha bears Hellen³⁸ to Zeus³⁹; Hellen, with a nymph of Othrys⁴⁰—which fixes his dwelling in the Hellas of Homer—begets three sons. Of these, Aeolus succeeds his father in the rulership; Dorus moves to Parnassus; Xuthus, in all probability, to the Attic Tetrapolis. Xuthus’ sons, Ion and Achaeus, go into the Peloponnese: Achaeus receives Laconia, Ion the northern coast.

At the time of the poet, Lacedaimon belonged to the Dorians, while on the northern coast dwelt people who called themselves Achaeans. The conclusion is therefore unavoidable that it was narrated—or at least presupposed—that the Achaeans, driven out by the Dorians, migrated to what later became Achaea, and that the Ionians withdrew before them and emigrated to Asia. If Argos does not appear, then already at that time the seat of the Atridae will have been transferred from Homer’s Argos to Sparta, as the Telemachy and the lyric poetry of the sixth century assume; this is plainly an annexation by the powerful Spartans. In that case Orestes or Tisamenus could already have gone over to Asiatic Aeolis.

This is a division different from the Asiatic tripartition of the Hellenes and therefore of great importance; and Hesiod assists us further. He places Aeolus in Phthian Hellas and has all the other descendants of Hellen migrate southwards. That the Ionians—and in part also the Achaeans—did not remain in the Peloponnese follows of itself. This accords with the fact that the catalogues—whose fragments are supplemented in particular by the Bibliotheca of Apollodorus—represent the Peloponnese as settled by descendants of Aeolus. Sisyphus comes to Corinth; Perieres, Idas, Neleus, Amythaon to the west and south-west; the route in part leads through Aetolia, from which Lakonian heroes too—even Helen and the Dioscuri—are derived, though this can hardly be original.

Thus we grasp a second stratum of immigrants, and once again the dialects provide confirmation. For not only in Central Greece—without prejudice to all the minor peculiarities that exist even within these entirely non-literary vernaculars—is substantially the same language spoken (in Boeotia upon a substratum of the first stratum), but likewise in the north of the Peloponnese, Achaea with its neighbours; and even on the Saronic Gulf the urban speech of Argos exerts only a slight influence, yet by no means does Ionic underlie it. In Laconia the linguistic differentiation is difficult, but a settlement by this stratum prior to the Dorians is secured precisely there through gods and heroes.⁴¹ Messenia has nothing ancient and, in general, too little.

If we could follow Hesiod, this language would have to be called Aeolic; he does not think at all of the Hellenes of Asia. At present the name is lacking, which compels me always to speak merely of the second stratum. This very absence is characteristic of the lack of an integrating overlordship such as the Dorian states of Argos and Sparta later brought, and which accordingly expanded the significance of the Dorian name.

Understanding both the languages and the history of the Peloponnese depends upon distinguishing this second stratum both from the first—whose bearers belong to the Mycenaean culture—and from the two last waves of immigrants, the Eleans and the Dorians. Only of these latter has it remained unforgotten that they were immigrants; yet since the most powerful states—Argos and Sparta—regarded themselves as Dorian, and Corinth and several smaller states likewise, the whole peninsula could be called Dorian, and the distinction between the Dorians and the second stratum was lost, although the individual legends everywhere make it perceptible.

The tradition, as authoritatively fixed by Ephorus, represents the Eleans as migrating together with the Dorians from Naupactus; but it is certain that this entire late-constructed story is wholly unreliable. We must not only detach everything connected with the so-called Return of the Heraclidae, but also abandon the association of the Eleans under Oxylus with the Dorian migration. The Eleans have always regarded themselves as kinsmen of the Aetolians, and for a crossing from that region Naupactus is the natural point. Their language is strongly intermixed with Arcadian; otherwise it will scarcely be possible to separate what they themselves brought with them from what belongs to the second stratum, which gave the Peneius its old Thessalian name and regarded its heroes as Aeolids, even Salmoneus, who is nonetheless the representative of the Triphylian city Salmona.

To gain clarity about the Dorians, the first requirement is to adhere to data that which is independent of the alleged Return of the Heraclidae. Concerning Crete, we know nothing at all, for colonisation from Sparta will be taken seriously by no one. What remains is, for Corinth, that it was conquered from the seaward side (Thuc. IV 42), and for Argos the same; for Temenion on the coast of the Argive plain is named for the conqueror Temenus.⁴² Of Sparta we hear only that the Dorians are settled in that city—which they in fact so named in place of Lacedaimon⁴³—and that Amyclae resisted them for a very long time. Only after they had captured this place could they advance further downstream as far as the coast. Thus they cannot have come up the Eurotas. The terrain therefore permits only two possibilities: either they came from the west, up the Alpheius valley and down the Eurotas valley, or from Argos across the high plateau where Tegea and Mantinea later lay. For a march across the northern Arcadian mountains is just as inconceivable as a landing, say, at Epidaurus Limera; in either case they would have encountered a wholly inhospitable mountain region. By the former route they might have come together with the Eleans, but it was precisely the upper valley of the Eurotas that they wrested from the Arcadians only after establishing themselves at Sparta. The other route requires that they should have split off from those who secured Argos.

In antiquity, the determination of the original seats of the Dorian tribe rested on no more than that a few insignificant villages north of Parnassus bore Dorian names; there Hesiod already settled Dorus, and Herodotus likewise, assigning them several earlier stations (I 56)—where from, however, cannot be determined, and hence the evidence is unusable.⁴⁴ The ethnic name proves no more than that a fragment remained behind in the land when the main body migrated; whether these Dorians differed in their dialect from their neighbours, or shared distinctive traits with Cretans and Spartans, cannot be verified. I regard as reliable only those inferences that may be drawn from the three phylai of the Dorians and their names. The Hylleis and Dymanes, together with the mixed phyle Πάμφυλοι, are not named after lineages—that is, eponymous ancestors—although they were of course interpreted as such in antiquity,⁴⁵ but are themselves ethnic names.⁴⁶ We know the Hylleis as an Illyrian⁴⁷ or Epirote tribe opposite Corcyra; their eponym is Hyllus, son of Heracles. This tribe therefore had a claim to regard itself as Heraclid; but this was a late invention, arising when the Dorian migration was transformed into the Return of the Heraclidae. Dymanes cannot be separated from Dyme, the city at the north-western corner of the Peloponnese. The Dorians, therefore, are not a single tribe but a federation of several elements, like the Saxons and the Franks; in the Pamphyloi several smaller groups are combined. Δωριεῖς cannot be derived from Dorus and eludes interpretation altogether.⁴⁸ They thus presented themselves as a mixed band of emigrants under these names. From this one may conclude that they moved southward from the interior of the Balkan peninsula and from Epirus; there we find the Acarnanians, in whose name the specifically Dorian god Carnos is embedded.⁴⁹ On the next stage the Dymanes join them—unless Dyme itself denotes those who were left behind. They then proceed by sea, first to Crete, and thereafter a portion lands at the Temenion in the Argolid. The extremely primitive state of society and custom which we encounter in Crete and in Sparta accords well with such an origin, as does the fact that the Lydian Alcman says, “I am neither a Thessalian nor an Ἐρυσιχαῖος,” in which Apollodorus finds an Acarnanian tribe.⁵⁰

The legend already known to Hecataeus—of the Heraclidae pursued by Eurystheus, who return to found the three kingdoms of Argos, Sparta, and Messenia—is wholly devoid of historical content. In the great battle at the Isthmus, sometimes Eurystheus falls, sometimes Hyllus, so that the victory is made to decide now for one side, now for the other. A Dorian kingdom in Messenia never existed; one need only read the introduction to Pausanias’ fourth book. It is also evident that the Spartans, by inventing the story that they had acquired Messenia by deceit from other Dorians, provided themselves with a justification for their annexation. The Heraclidae could be equated with the Dorians only once there existed a Heracles: he is named after Hera, thus originates from Argos, and accordingly the Dorian kings there made him their ancestor. Since he descended from Perseus, their rule was thereby legitimised; for Eurystheus had unjustly forestalled Heracles’ rightful claim. Thus it already stands in the Iliad. It follows further that Heracles can only have become the ancestor of the Spartans once he had first been made the ancestor of the Dorians in Argos; this had occurred before Tyrtaeus, for he already calls the Spartans Heraclidae. Indeed, the royal houses named after Eurypon and Agis were traced back to two shadowy Heraclids, Procles and Eurysthenes, of whom Eurysthenes is linked to Eurystheus by name.

But for the Heraclidae to have any right to Lacedaemon, it was necessary that Heracles should once have possessed it. This is also narrated in great detail: he is first repulsed, but then succeeds in slaying the numerous Hippocoontidae, whom Alcman enumerates in the Partheneion. According to the mythographers, the victor hands over the land to Tyndareus, who is to hold it in trust for the descendants of Heracles. Heracles came from Argos and therefore had to pass through Tegea, and of this too the legend knows how to tell. Perhaps at this point a motif from Tegean tradition may be adduced. Hesiod, fr. 90, related that Tyndareus gave his daughter Timandra in marriage to Echemos of Tegea. It was he who slew Hyllus at the Isthmus, a heroic deed of which the Tegeans boast in Herodotus IX.26.

Here the Tegean represents the Achaeans and Ionians, whom Herodotus, following Hesiod, regards as the inhabitants of the Peloponnese before the Dorians. How this came about is scarcely conceivable unless that duel were firmly established and only later transferred to the Isthmus. As a defensive counter-tradition against the Dorians—that is, the Lacedaemonians, who were eager to annex Tegea but never succeeded in possessing it—this is readily intelligible, though it then had to be placed in the time of Hyllus. In this there is certainly no memory of a Dorian immigration from the Argolid through Tegea to Sparta; but there may well be a recollection of the legends of Heracles’ campaign against Lacedaemon. And in those narratives—so ancient and so richly developed—such a memory may very well be embedded.

Both in the Argolid and in Laconia the language of the immigrants did not remain wholly pure, but absorbed a great deal from the older inhabitants. In Argos this has been brought to light in particular by Vollgraff’s most recent discoveries, which reveal contacts with Aeolic, that is, the language of the first stratum; that of the second is difficult to distinguish from Doric. In Sparta as well, traces of Arcadian survive all the way down to Taenarum. This holds even more strongly for cults and heroes, where the different strata can often be distinguished. Nor is Cretan itself purely Doric. It will be worthwhile to search for loanwords from the non-Greek language; yet there were already Hellenes on the great island, for Idomeneus is certainly no Dorian—though whether he belongs to an immigration of the first or of the second stratum may be left undecided; such immigrations will in any case not have been lacking.

The well-known passage of the Odyssey (τ 175⁵¹) lists four peoples on Crete: Eteocretans and Cydonians—that is, the old population—Achaeans and Pelasgians. Of these, some are the Cretans of Idomeneus and Meriones⁵²; but who are the others? Later immigrants from the Peloponnese, not of Dorian stock—thus people of the second stratum—or indeterminate aboriginal inhabitants? Both Arcadians and Argives could be called Pelasgians by the rhapsode. I do not know how to decide.

The main body of the Dorians must have come to Crete, for in the end they gained control of almost the entire island. It is therefore likely that the occupation of Argos, and then, probably via Argos, that of Sparta, proceeded from here. At first, however, they were only a minority on Crete, but the enfeebled older population submitted; they were pressed into slavery as μνωία (δμωία) or became οἰχέες, half-free dependants. Kingship—or chieftainship, as one may call it—disappeared entirely. In other respects, however, the youth-bands and the communal meals of the men remained; femininity receded completely, something which garnered ill repute among the other Greeks. It is a fortunate accident that the written codification of the law of Gortyn has been preserved for us. It did not occur earlier there than elsewhere, even if one includes the older inscriptions of the Pythion. Yet the fame of Minos as a lawgiver is of great antiquity, and in the sixth century the island is regarded as the homeland of priests of expiation—Karmanor and Epimenides. Cretan sculpture, too—Dipoinos and Skyllis—and Cretan pottery is said to have exerted influence upon the Peloponnese.⁵³ These are isolated observations that fit together poorly; in truth we know only scattered details.

In Sparta the ancient social order was preserved, even though the Dorians, advancing gradually from this city—or rather settlement, to which they gave its name⁵⁴—subjugated the three extremities of the peninsula: the eastern coast against Argos, the rich western lands against the Messenians [and the southern promontory, Taenarum]. Kingship, divided between two families for reasons unknown, retained its ancient position, possessing—alongside many honorary privileges—no more than the command in war. The designation Ἡρακλεῖδαι is assumed for the two royal houses⁵⁵—which never intermarry—and for the entire people (Tyrtaeus fr. 8 D.), though just as on Crete the cult of Herakles is of no real importance. This is therefore an attachment to the myth and points back to Argos.

In Argos, the Dorian institutions did not persist; even the tribes—though in Sparta as well they no longer exist in the sixth century—possess scarcely any significance for the state. The Dorians thus mixed extensively with the population they found there. Naturally, remnants of the oldest Hellenic inhabitants, the Danaans, were still present, whose cities had not been destroyed; and there had also arrived an immigration of the second stratum, precisely those who had broken the power of the Mycenaeans and driven their bravest across the sea. This is reflected in the peculiarly mixed language, in which what is specifically Doric is slight.⁵⁶

The king-list corresponds to this. From Temenos onward Dorians appear, whose names for the most part we do not know. At the beginning stand two primordial ancestors, Inachos and Phoroneus; in Mycenae the Pelopids, alongside Eurystheus, who belongs to Herakles, together with his parents traced back to the new hero of Mycenae, Perseus, and transferred to the new capital, Argos.⁵⁷ Abas, who points toward the Abantes of Phocis; Proitos, after whom a gate of Thebes is named; Akrisios, and the name of the citadel Larisa, which are connected with Thessaly; Anaxagoras and Adrastos, who appear without clear linkage. A careful working-through and differentiation of this tradition has yet to be undertaken. The great expansion of power which raised Argos to the position of the foremost great power on the peninsula was the work of the Dorian kings down to Pheidon, about 660; thereafter it collapsed together with the kingship. Sparta then assumed the inheritance. From Argos most of the cities of the Argolid were Dorianised—Epidauros, from there Aigina, Troizen, probably Hermione as well, and further Phleius and Sikyon. Corinth was occupied from the sea, earlier than the others; Megara followed. From Asine the Dryopians were expelled, concerning whose ethnic origin even the Swedish excavations have yielded no clarification. Yet none of these places became genuinely Dorian: the immigration was too weak, and Argos was unable to exercise direct rule.

Whether Argos or Sparta held the hegemony, it always remained Dorian; and others, though independent, allied with the hegemon likewise called themselves Dorian. Thus Sophocles could call the Peloponnese a Dorian island (Oedipus Coloneus 696), and Pindar in the year of the battle of Marathon could call the Saronic Gulf a Dorian sea (Paean 6.123). In this it little mattered how much genuinely Dorian blood there was: the second immigration had marched under that name as well, so that the language too was called Doric, even in distinction from Laconian. And so modern scholars have often extended the Dorian migration to those elements in the Peloponnese which are neither Ionic nor Arcadian—an extension incompatible alike with the cultural condition of the Cretans and the Lacedaemonians, and with the reliable traditions.

It is a painful gap that archaeological research has scarcely discovered anything of substance to elucidate the centuries in which the Hellenes of the mainland lived after the collapse of the Mycenaean culture, in the period of the geometric style—especially in the Peloponnese. Mud huts and wooden buildings were too perishable, or their remains too insignificant. The temples of the gods, too, must have been of the same perishable construction, when people at last began to build such structures—late enough, since earlier they had neither possessed them nor found them.⁵⁸ Thus it is above all the grave pottery that instructs us: ceramics alone recount for us, in continuous fashion, the history of how the Hellenes slowly developed out of their own resources. The after-effects of the Cretan–Mycenaean period gradually fade away; in the geometric style there emerges what must be appreciated if one is to grasp what is specifically Hellenic, however remote it may seem from the artistic impulse of the contemporary epic. The very name geometric betrays this, and Buschor has described the decoration as “saturated with mathematics.” Was it not the harmony of proportions in which the Hellenic first revealed itself to us in the Treasury of Atreus? And does not the same mathematics live on in the Doric temple, to come ultimately to rule in the strophic structure of lyric poetry, in the periods of Isocrates, and in the Platonic Academy to raise philosophy to the level of a science? Homer provides the complement: to see all things clearly and sharply and to set them before our eyes as they appear to sight—physical sight as well as the sight of the mind—a capacity still wholly remote from the painter. Only towards the end of the sixth century, casting off everything Oriental, does the latter begin to represent things—above all human beings—as they truly appear to the eye, and thereby to determine their portrayal in the arts for all time, so that what is in fact conquered only through a mighty new achievement of the Hellenes comes to seem almost self-evident. In the great epics, composed through collaboration, the harmonious, mathematical structure now appears to be lacking; yet one has only to look with sufficient acuity to discern it in very striking instances.⁵⁹

On the whole, the centuries of the geometric style will remain for us an intermediate period of quiet and sombre self-reflection and self-development, in which we can recognise, at least in outline, the distinctive character of Sparta, of the Isthmian states only superficially Dorianised—to which Argos may be reckoned—and also that of the Athenians: the Dipylon vases already proclaim their artistic superiority. By the end of the eighth century the Peloponnese could already contribute a surplus of population to the colonisation of the West. At that time, too, a flood of new forms pours in from the Orient and fertilises painting, and through it the imagination of the people; and the influx of the Ionic epic brings about an intellectual upheaval. Of religion I do not yet speak. That was the first act in which the Asiatic colonial land reacted upon European Hellas and demonstrated its superiority. The result was the adoption of the Homeric common language and the Homeric world of the gods. The second act is the penetration of Ionic thought—of Ionic natural philosophy and of the critique of every inherited nomos—made possible by the political successes of the Athenian people, who had preserved the old stock. Yet political unification failed, because the peoples of the later immigration—the Peloponnesians and the Boeotians, together with the Western Greeks⁶⁰—proved too strong. With that it was decided that the Hellenes could not become a political unity and therefore could not maintain their independence. At the same time, however, the intellectual unification of the nation was decided in the Ionic–Attic spirit. A Hellenism came into being which, by virtue of its spirit, imparted itself both to the Orient, which it ruled, and to the Italic peoples, who in turn ruled it; and which produced a science and, in Socratic thought, a religion that may for a time be denied or even forgotten, but can never perish.

How the settlement of Asia took place, and what occurred in the centuries that led to this new culture, we are eager to know; yet even for the future the prospects are slight. For the soil has thus far yielded nothing of importance, and the recording of historical content appears to have begun only after the invasion of the Cimmerians, when individual products of contemporary poetry were already preserved (Callinus, Semonides, Archilochus). Stone inscriptions, too, begin only at this point. True, an Ionic League had formed somewhat earlier, but it comprised only the cities from Phocaea to Miletus, by no means all Ionians, and it failed at every moment of danger, so that the entire coast fell under the rule first of the Lydians and then of the Persians. From that time onward the Ionians were rightly regarded by the warlike Hellenes of the motherland as unmartial and effeminate.⁶¹ In their cities, tyranny (an Ionic word) and democracy alternated—both alike unrestrained. An aristocratic society, such as those still found throughout the motherland maintaining a sense of a peer class despite political fragmentation, is discernible in Asia only on Doric Rhodes.

We may call the epic courtly, for it is clearly addressed to a society of warriors who see in the heroes the glorification of their own ancestors. It preserves the memory of deeds that lie centuries in the past and for the most part still take place in the motherland (the Thebais entirely so), and it everywhere presupposes as existing the splendour of the principalities which we are now coming to know from the palaces and graves of the Argolid. Of Hellenes settled on Asiatic soil the poet will know nothing, although he himself and his hearers spring from them. This is explicable only if heroic poetry had been handed down from the very periods which it seeks to present in conscious archaism—where, admittedly, even the Iliad is not free from lapses, for which we are grateful, since through them we learn something of later conditions. Homer stands as much at the end as at the beginning of a period—Homer, that is, the Iliad; for the later epics, among which the Odyssey certainly belongs, already fall within times from which contemporary evidence has survived. The heroic figures remain, but they often become the bearers of actions no longer heroic.

Thus Homer teaches us scarcely anything about the occupation of the Asiatic coast and the formation of the new Aeolic and Ionic peoples. The assumption and dating of this Aeolic and Ionic–Attic migration, which became dominant in antiquity, are wholly without value. What is usable lies only in the traditions of the individual cities.⁶² Probably not only raids by the powerful rulers of the Argolid into Asia took place, but also attempts at settlement, at a time when the Cretan sea-power still had to be confronted. Decisive, however, was the emigration of the defeated Hellenes of the first stratum, when the second shattered their strongholds. The individual cities of Ionia are able to state from how many regions their settlers came; from this we learn that bands from all parts—ranging from Thessaly to Tainaron, and from the west from Kalydon and from Pylos, that is, from the western edge of the peninsula—arrived here and there. The names are often given according to the regions as they were later called, which must not mislead us into thinking that these were the later Boeotians or Aetolians; rather, they were the older inhabitants, of a different tribal affiliation. Nowhere did compact tribes appear, with the sole exception of the Magnetes. We know them only north of Sipylos, where they became a Hellenic enclave through the incursion of the Mysians, and of which nothing further is heard. The more important group settled on the Maeander and gave their city their own name. When this site became uninhabitable because of the river, they transferred the city into a neighbouring valley near the village of Leukophrys on Mount Thorax—Hellenic names, to be sure, but their Artemis is the Lydian goddess. They had therefore Hellenised no small territory, yet they did not enter the Ionic League, and thus were presumably already subject to the Lydians, nor did they belong to the Athenian empire⁶³; later they became wholly Ionised.

That on Lesbos and on the opposite mainland coast the Aeolians were able to maintain themselves, linguistically distinct from the Ionians, shows that settlers of the first stratum, predominantly from Boeotia and Thessaly, migrated here. The connection with Boeotia was preserved in memory; that with Thessaly is recognisable from the language, and is particularly close, although on Lesbos it was entirely forgotten.⁶⁴ Alongside this, Orestes or his son is said to have led the Aeolic migration, so that Peloponnesians too must have taken part; Telephos of Teuthrania–Pergamon is an Arcadian. Thus there was no lack of ethnic mixture here either, yet the Aeolic language predominated; it alone constitutes a discernible distinction from the Ionic.

Of the later Ionians, the two great islands that have always been reckoned to Asia appear to have been settled first; at any rate, Ephesus and Miletus were colonised from Samos. Thereafter it proved possible to gain control of the mouths of the three great rivers, by conquering the cities situated there—Smyrna (this one, however, from Colophon), Ephesus, Priene, Myessos (as the name must have sounded), and Miletus. In contrast to the Maeander region,⁶⁵ the names on the Mimas peninsula—apart from Teos and the small Lebedos, which gravitates toward Ephesus⁶⁶—are Greek, as are those farther north, Phocaea and Leuce. Here, then, resistance on the part of the indigenous population was slight. The ancient oracle of Apollo at Claros, near Colophon, likewise traces itself back to Hellenic founders.

On Lesbos the place-names are for the most part pre-Greek, yet we hear nothing of a foreign population, except that the primeval king Μάχαρ represents them as father of the cities. On the Maeander matters were otherwise. Branchos is not a Greek name, and among the liturgical formulae belongs βεδυ ζαψ χναξζβι⁶⁷—Carian words that had become meaningless. When Dareios deported the Branchidae, they were indeed already Hellenised, whereas at Ephesus the priesthood of Artemis not only remained autonomous alongside the Greek city, but retained the greater power. While on the islands we hear only of Carians, and the place-names from Rhodes to the Thracian coast appear to belong to the same language—one to which not a few coastal names also correspond⁶⁸—on Asiatic soil we encounter many tribes, in part locally distinct: Mysians, Maeonians–Lydians, Carians, who are also called Pamphylians and Phoenicians⁶⁹ (hence the “Phoenician” Thales), the Caunians, the Lycians; in addition the vanished Trojans and Teucrians, the Gergithes, and probably many further such isolated groups. In the interior dwell the Phrygians (the Bebryces near Cyzicus), known to the Hellenes, though their migration has been forgotten. The Thracian Mysians only migrated in after Aeolis had already become Greek and had even advanced eastward beyond Ida.⁷⁰ The Aeolians were confined to the coastal strip, and the angle where the Lydians later founded Adramyttium did not belong to them. Everyone will readily concede that many attempts at settlement failed, as did the expedition against Ilion, or remained fruitless through a reverse of fortune. Thus the few places on the southern side of the peninsula in which the Pamphylian dialect was spoken down into the fourth century are remnants of a settlement that had once extended as far as fertile Cilicia. Here the Hittite empire may still have intervened; that the Ionic cities attained secure prosperity was due to the fact that no real power stood opposed to them. Only in the south did the Lycians successfully defend their entire coastline.

The intermixture of the Hellenes with the indigenous population must be reckoned as very considerable; there is, after all, talk of Carian women. True, the natives were for the most part reduced to dependent peasants and shepherds, who paid dues to their Hellenic lords,⁷¹ but for all that they can hardly have stood very much worse than the λαοί of the mighty princes, who in the Iliad form a mass in which the poet takes no interest; ληός among the Ionians had indeed come to mean a servant.⁷² But apart from the priests of the gods, to whom the Hellenes now also paid homage, there were likewise cities in which two communities existed side by side. Herodotus (I.147) knows of such a dual kingship, where the Asiatic traces his descent to Glaukos of the Iliad—who is indeed a Lycian, yet derives from the Hellene Bellerophontes, whose very name unmistakably marks him as Lycian; evidently he cannot be separated from the ancestor of the royal house of the city. Hellenisation had already begun once such a genealogy was acknowledged. Elsewhere the natives, when they were admitted to citizenship, seem to have been grouped together in a phylē, as at Miletus among the βωρεῖς⁷³; and it may be that at Samos one of the two phylai initially belonged to them. The new cities, by analogy with the old tribal constitutions, organised their heterogeneous citizen bodies into phylai, and sometimes also into phratries⁷⁴—in very different and even changing forms; yet these artificial formations never attained a significance comparable to that which they possessed in the motherland.⁷⁵ Nor, indeed, will the cities for a long time have contained a very numerous body of full citizens. Within the city, moreover, the citizens overwhelmingly tended to reside, even when they possessed extensive landed property, in which the villages can hardly have been permanently inhabited by many citizens.⁷⁶ For the construction of stone circuit-walls. the means long remained insufficient; yet a citadel will have been fortified, and earthworks, such as those described in Book Μ of the Iliad, may well have sufficed.

The differences among the individual cities remained considerable for a long time, as Herodotus himself still notes in his own day even with regard to the spoken language. We can no longer discern these distinctions; we see only that the epic tradition took shape in the north, where Aeolic and Ionic mingled, with the latter gaining the upper hand, and that in the sixth century Miletus exercised intellectual leadership, perhaps even controlling the linguistic form of prose—though this is by no means certain. How, then, are we even remotely to recognise the manner in which Ionian identity was formed—an identity which, already before 700, had attained its full intellectual character and, under an old name, constituted a new people? This, moreover, embraces far more than the twelve cities of the Ionian League, especially towards the south; it subjugates the Carians, and at Halicarnassus the Dorians are wholly eclipsed by it. The same is perceptible on Cos, and the physicians there, like those of Cnidus,⁷⁷ write in Ionic—not only for the public, but also in entirely private records. The Nesiotes likewise regard themselves as Ionians, all who gather around Apollo of Delos; and even if their language is less disintegrated than in Asia, the spirit of Archilochus of Paros is nevertheless the same. This must be said even of the Aeolians: for although Lesbos has its own great figures, in relation to the motherland they too belong to the new Hellenism that is called Ionian; their dialect, after all, soon disappears from literature, and for literature—and indeed for the panhellenic character as a whole—the Asiatic Dorians long remain of no consequence. They had come from the Argolid at the time of Argos’ ascendancy; but before them there had settled there Hellenes of the first stratum, who on Cos and at Cnidus display clear connections with Thessaly.⁷⁸ Yet the traces of the ancient population are by no means absent from the place-names, nor from the cults⁷⁹; and on Rhodes this element decidedly predominates. In the admittedly very ill-assembled archaeology of Diodorus’ Book on the Islands there is much that is remarkable. One sees that the settlers did not merely adopt Helios, but also richly figured myths—the Telchines, Phaethon–Tenages, Alectrona.⁸⁰ The very name betrays a light-divinity, and this is the Elektra of Samothrace, whom the poets of the Φαινόμενα (among them an Aeolian, Sminthes) introduced either as a Pleiad or as a comet; earlier still she was supposed to have been the mother of Dardanus. Here a thread runs from north to south, and one is tempted to draw into the picture the goddesses likened to Artemis or simply called Παρθένος on Icaria and Leros (where she was also named Iokallis), as well as the Παρθένος of Thracian Neapolis.⁸¹ These deified lights of heaven—if such they were—exercised no further influence upon the Hellenes. Rhodian archaeology has even drawn Makareus of Lesbos into its orbit; this may be a Rhodian annexation, but it may also indicate ancient connections.

Up to this point we have made only linguistic observations, which point to a great people; but the tribes into which it must have been divided we do not yet distinguish. On the islands we hear only of the Carians; yet of individual figures—such as Anios of Delos—very few are known, and far more is said of the Cretan domination, while of the settlers prior to the problematic Athenian sequence⁸² we learn very little. On Naxos there even appear Thracians (Diodorus V 50), which is by no means inconceivable, since they had the northern Sporades in their power—Lemnos after the expulsion of the Hellenes; the Pelasgians, as the Athenians later called the native population once they had settled cleruchs there, were in all likelihood Thracians rather than Etruscans.⁸³ On Imbros, whose name is Carian like that of its god Ἴμβραμος, there was a branch of the Samothracian gods; the Athenians called the god Hermes or Ὀρθάνης, so that he was ithyphallic. This points to Thrace, among whom Herodotus (V 7) names Hermes as a chief god, and to the coins of Ainos, which show on the obverse a head of Hermes and on the reverse the goat which he once was, when together with Rhene (the ewe) he begot Saon, the eponym of Saonnesos–Samothrace (Diodorus V 48). When he experienced an epiphany under Hadrian (Dionysius Periegetes 503), he was more likely Egyptian in character.

Samothrace possessed its “Great Gods” or “Cabiri”, preferably named after the island itself; identification with the Dioscuri or other Hellenic figures never gained acceptance. No offshoots of the cult were founded. Yet Akusilaos already (fr. 20) knew something of them, and Stesimbrotus in the Periclean age concerned himself with these mysteries, whose sacred formulae preserved the foreign language (Diodorus V 47). Because they brought help in shipwreck, Athenians too submitted to initiation (Aristophanes, Peace 277)⁸⁴; their importance, however, came through the favour of kings in the Hellenistic age, and this continued into Roman times. But what attracted men was precisely the un-Hellenic character, and for Hellenic religion they do not come into consideration, however eagerly devotees of mysteries may intoxicate themselves with their abstruse names. The Orientals adopted as the name of the Greeks that of the Ionians, in a very ancient form, which the Iliad seems deliberately to avoid⁸⁵; it also knows no Hellenes, but only the district Ἡλλας in southern Thessaly. When it wishes to designate the tribes united before Ilios by a collective name, it says Ἀργείοι, Peloponnesians, or Δαναοί—that is, the people of the Argolid—or Ἀχαιοί, not infrequently Παναχαιοί. Thus these will have been the designations by which the inhabitants of the colonial land described themselves when they wished to emphasise their unity as a nation.⁸⁶

We have seen how Hesiod brings Achaios from Phthian Hellas into the Peloponnese, first to Sparta, but from there to the northern coast, where the name was preserved. In the southern Thessalian district it was likewise retained, in order to distinguish its bearers from the Thessalians, but also from their Aeolian dependants; in reality people of the second stratum were settled there, as the language proves, and the same holds for the later Achaeans of the Peloponnese. In Boeotia there is a Demeter Ἀχαία, which shows that she was pre-Boeotian.⁸⁷

There will therefore once have existed a tribe of that name, but it is not historically graspable.⁸⁸ Precisely for that reason no individual tribe suffered offence when the name, on account of its antiquity, was elevated to a collective designation; this will have occurred at the time when the epic was still Aeolic and the Asiatic Aeolians had come from southern Thessaly.⁸⁹ In the Odyssey the name has lost every specific ethnic significance.

The name which established itself in the motherland as that of the nation was Πανέλληνες, shortened to Ἕλληνες. Hesiod found it already in use when he made Ἕλλην the father of the tribal heroes. Zeus of Oros on Aegina is called Panhellenios, because all the neighbouring peoples worship him. When the Olympic Games admit all tribes, their officials are called Ἕλλανοδίχαι. Hesiod, Works and Days 528, says Πανέλληνες where he wishes to include the colonists; these in turn adopted the name, as is shown by the Catalogue of Ships at 530 and by Archilochus 54 D. Ἑλλήνιον is the name of the sacred precinct at Naukratis (Herodotus II 178), founded initially by the Hellenes of Asia and later opened to all other Hellenes; in this way the name Achaean was displaced.

The Ionians—together with the Lesbians only sporadically in their vicinity—later, but already before the Cimmerian invasion, settled the Thracian coasts of the “Black Sea gulf”, the Hellespont, the Propontis, and even the Pontus itself. Here and there the Megarians followed them, and in southern Thrace Ionians from Euboea and the islands did likewise.⁹⁰ This led to lasting contacts with the never-subdued Thracians, and also to reverses, as when Imbros and Lemnos were lost again. Homer already calls the island “Thracian Samos”; the Carian name may have existed even before the Samian settlement, which accommodated itself to the native cult. Diodorus V 47 records a name Σαόννησος, in which one may suspect the Σάιοι. Other elements also entered the legends, such as the Mysian Hylas, but scarcely anything passed into the general cult. The reinterpretation of barbarian gods in Hellenic terms could not fail to occur.⁹¹ But for the Hellenic religion, only that is of relevance which can be traced back to the motherland.

The same holds entirely true of the Western Hellenes. We shall readily supplement Corinthian elements from Syracuse, Laconian from Tarentum; yet however important the Hellenisation of their gods may have been for the Italic peoples and the Sicels, and however often native deities lie concealed beneath Hellenic names, all this nevertheless remains epichoric, even when, on some unknown occasion, the goddess of the Elymians—who for the Greeks was an Aphrodite of Eryx—came to receive a cult in Hellas itself.⁹² Only with the Pythagorean religious movement, and with the medicine of Alcmaeon and Empedocles, does the West begin to exert an influence upon the motherland. Still later, in all likelihood, Ammon came over to Hellas from Cyrene.

What the Hellenic ships brought back from lands of high civilisation must indeed be rated very highly—not so much the Pataikoi which they carried on their ships,⁹³ nor the cult of Adonis practised by women, which always remained a foreign cult,⁹⁴ as Semitic and Egyptian religious ideas, and, after the establishment of Persian rule, Iranian ones as well. But it scarcely needs to be stated that all this, for the present, does not concern us at all—and everything later still less so.

FOOTNOTES

1. ↩ These are correspondences which now point in one direction, now in another, so that conclusions regarding ancient ethnic connections are inadmissible. Naturally, the primordial people as a unity, together with its language, is a practical fiction; for the people has always consisted of a sum of tribes which at times separated, at times intermingled, and also mixed with other races.

2. ↩ Plato, Theaetetus 175:
νὸ ἀπαιδευσίας … οὐ γιγνώσκουσι λογίζεσθαι ὅτι πάντων καὶ προγόνων μυριάδες ἕκαστοι γεγόνασιν ἀναρίθμητοι … καὶ βασιλέων καὶ δούλων, βαρβάρων τε καὶ Ἑλλήνων.

3. ↩ The name Γραιχοί clings to Dodona (Aristotle, Meteorologica I.14), evidently following the recension of the Hesiodic Catalogues (fr. 4), which otherwise we know only through John Lydus. The name Γραῆς is attached to Oropos, which itself reappears as a place-name in Thesprotia (Stephanos of Byzantium). For this reason I adhere to what I stated in Hermes 21 (1886), p. 113. That Tanagraeans, that is, Graeans, migrated to Kyme–Neapolis I myself inferred from the local phyle Εὐνοστίδαι and from the Tanagraean hero Eunostos. But that the Latin designation Graeci should have originated from there is an ill-considered notion; for how could the Graikoi have come from Neapolis to Dodona? A Hesiodic poet knows them at Dodona; at Neapolis no one does. Rather, the same Chaonians who had reached as far as Kroton by the time the Hellenes arrived there were settled in Epirus. The eponym Graus must therefore have been a figure of importance, and likewise his tribe; for he belongs not only among the leaders of the so-called Aeolic migration, but also appears as a royal name on Cyprus (Head, Historia Numorum, p.739).

4. ↩ Alongside the Thracian name, that of the Phlegyes must also be considered. For this people occupies, as an enemy of the Delphic god, the very same region as the Thracians and then disappears. The Iliad (Ν 301) seems to know them in Thrace or in what was at that time still Thracian northern Thessaly. Accordingly, Phlegyas appears in Thessalian genealogies. In the place of the Phlegyes there also appear the Dryopes, οἱ ἀπὸ δρυός (“those of the land-born stock”); concerning them Homer speaks at Iliad 2.363. For the Heliconian Thracians, the Θαμυρίδδοντες of a Boeotian inscription are important (Bull. Corr. Hell. L, 401), since Thamyris is a Thracian. Their territory must even have extended as far as Orchomenos, if a Thracian bears the name τεγύριος (Apollodoros, Bibliotheca III.202).

5. ↩ Since both Pandion and Tereus appear in Megara, the story of Procne, which was early transferred to Athens, properly belongs there; Hesiod may still have presupposed this. Tereus is always a Thracian, and in his name he will be connected with the Odrysian Teres, for whose sake Sophocles transferred him to Thrace. The Megarian tradition knows Thracians near Pagai only in a remote corner; but to these are added the Thracians of Eleusis.

6. ↩ That he could still, even in very late times, be represented as three-headed shows how primitive this religion remained. What he signified, of course, no one can say. The restoration θεῶ πανθοποιῶ (Arch. Anz. 1929, 235) is by no means certain.

7. ↩ All the excessive discussion about the ethnic position of the Macedonians and their language could have been avoided if one had adhered, as one should, to the Hesiodic genealogy. Macedon and Magnes stand not beneath but alongside Hellen. This accords with what language and customs teach. The Magnetes must have withdrawn to Asia at an early date, pushed up the valleys of the Hermos and the Maeander by the Aeolians and Ionians who pressed after them, where at least their name has been preserved. This name also occurs on Crete, however difficult that may be for us to understand, if the ancient tradition can be trusted. Hermes XXX, Gött. Anz. 1900, 571.

8. ↩ A claim to autochthony is also implied in the notion that the Locrians wished to have sprung from stones; this legend belongs to them together with the Deucalionian flood. Conversely, they were equated with the Leleges and thus declared originally barbarian. Presumably remnants of the so-called Leleges long survived among them; but they invented the flood in which everything perished and from which a new race arose in them. The flood-myth which in Boeotia and Athens is connected with a primeval king Ogygos derives mankind from the water; but Ogygos–Okeanos is Carian. This may also hold for the derivation of the eponym from the river-god, yet the Hellenes then made this belief entirely their own.

9. ↩ Homer knows of Leleges on the Satnioeis, but here the poet may be using a tribal name from the motherland, just as he does with the Pelasgians and the Caucones. Reliable, however, is the statement in Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae 46, which knows the Leleges alongside the Milyans at Tralles.

10. ↩ Lost tribal names such as the Temmiker, Aithiker, Aoner, and Caucones remain ethnically indeterminate, as do the Thoer on Mount Athos (Porphyry, De abstinentia II 8, among others). It is futile to speculate about them.

11. ↩ Athenaeus 461 mentions the Hyantes, whose name survives in the Phocian Hyampolis; they are said to have moved westward as far as Pleuron (Apollodorus fr. 205 Jac.). Herodian (Theognostes 28) knows that they occupied Boeotia before the Ἐγχτῆνες. This is the genuine form of the name; elsewhere it appears as Ἐχτῆνες. They are the ἐγχεχτημένοι. Conversely, the Rhodians call the native inhabitants Ἴγνητες, probably to be read Ἵ-γνητες rather than Ἴγ-γνητες.

12. ↩ We may confidently call these Mycenaeans Danaans, for Homer uses this name as a collective designation, like Ἀργέιοι, and it is preserved in Argos itself, precisely at Mycenae, whose later rulers assigned to their hero Perseus—of whom Homer knows something only through the Heracles saga—a Δανάη as his mother.

13. ↩ At Phylakopi on Melos, the Cretan element appears to be clearly distinguished from the primitive Carian.

14. ↩ Exceptions are names such as Miletos, which belong to a Cretan settlement, as one may readily assume likewise in the case of the nearby Priansos–Priene. The Cretan Malla probably belongs together with Mallos in Cilicia, although this appears on the coins as Marlos.

15. ↩ In the possibly Laconian epic poet Kinaithon (Pausanias VIII 53), Rhadamanthys has a purely Cretan genealogy, through Phaistos (constructed from Malten as Ἥφαιστος) from Talos. Less weight is to be given to his connection with Minos, since this appears in the catalogue of Zeus’ love affairs, Iliad Ε 322. Later Sarpedon, the Lycian, is added as a third brother; he bears the same name as two headlands, one in Cilicia, one in Thrace, so that the name must presumably be “Carian.” When the Phaeacians are said to have brought Rhadamanthys to Euboea and he is connected in Boeotia with Alcmene, this points away from Crete. Whether he became a judge of the dead because he was a just judge (Ῥαδαμάνθυος ὅρχος), and was therefore placed among the Isles of the Blessed, or whether he was transported there for some other reason (Aeschylus, Karians) and for that reason received the office of judge of the dead—I do not venture to decide.

16. ↩ Most people continue to call the city Praisos, although the name has been preserved and is written both with and without the now silent iota.

17. ↩ That the quince is named after them, and thus comes from their gardens, bears witness to a special culture which still awaits its discoverer. The western cape is called Diktynnaion, that is, after the goddess whose name cannot be separated from Dikte, the mountain in the east. The goddess could just as well have been adopted here as she was, on several occasions, in Greece.

18. ↩ Even on Skyros there is a Cretan courtyard, Friedrich, IG XII 8, p. 175.

19. ↩ We are too ready to judge gold by its present value. It was only a metal, attractive for its sheen, which no rust could corrode. For ornament it was recommended by its softness, but for that very reason it was useless for practical purposes. For iron they would have given a hundred times the weight in gold. Where the mass of gold came from is a question in itself. Rivers like the Pactolus undoubtedly carried large amounts of it with them.

20. ↩ The Rhodian Ἰδαμενεύς (IG XII 1, 737) can hardly have taken his name from the epic tradition, nor will he have been a Dorian; Greeks of the heroic age were on Rhodes before the Dorians of the Argolid arrived. A place called Ἰδομενή near Ambrakia (Thucydides III 112) probably has only a coincidental resemblance in name.

21. ↩ Even in the Telemachy, Odyssey ο 174, Menelaos wishes to grant Odysseus a city within his realm, that is, to make the lord of the tiny island his vassal.

22. ↩ As against the prevailing chatter about the “city-state”, which constantly confuses πόλις in the sense of city with πόλις in the sense of state, Gelzer spoke very aptly of “communal state and imperial state in Roman history”. This replaces πόλις with δῆμος. If one prefers that, I have no objection, for conceptually it suffices; but my term “tribal state” corresponds more precisely to the Hellenic political formations.

23. ↩ The inscription from Asine in Cypriot script is a wonderful surprise; but can it not have come from Cyprus? Persson’s further conclusions seem premature, as such things inevitably are. Yet one may still cherish the hope that the Cretan script will one day be read.

24. ↩ An exception is the conflict between the Calydon of Meleager and Pleuron, which bears a Greek name. Yet here too the lords of the citadel, which has a pre-Greek name, are still victorious. But the Homeric Thebais already knew the Calydonian Tydeus as an exile from his land.

25. ↩ They did not succeed in the conquest; that was achieved only by peoples from the north. The expedition of the Epigoni is, of course, an epic invention, though one that predates the Iliad, a proof that the Thebais was earlier—though not the Thebais that was read in the fifth century.

26. ↩ Recently excavations are said to have dated the settlement as early as around 1300. I know of this only from the brief notice in the excellent reports of the École française, Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 1928, 501.

27.↩ The name indicates that the Greeks found people of different race and language, thus the same situation as in the Maeander valley, where the Greeks use the term of the subjugated population; there Lydians and Carians met. It is therefore inaccurate to call the Hellenes Pamphylians after the non-Hellenes.

28. ↩ Μόψος belongs together with the Thessalian place Μόψιον and the tribal name Μόψοπες, which Hellenistic scholars excavated and, strikingly, referred to the Athenians.

29. ↩ It will be difficult to demonstrate substantial differences in vocabulary between the two dialects that go back to prehistoric times. In Asia, mixture and levelling naturally took place.

30. ↩ Mythologus II 170.

31. ↩ In the scholium on Euripides, Orestes 982, Tantalos bears the sky. On Mount Sipylos there is Niobe, daughter of Tantalos, a non-Greek name. In Argos she is the first beloved of Zeus, mother of Argos; she is now nothing but a name, and the myth that certainly once existed has completely vanished. Her transfer to Thebes also remains obscure.

32. ↩ We encounter the emigrants not only on Lesbos, but just as much on Mount Mykale (which shares its name with the Boeotian Mykalessos) and in Milet; the latter, even in a later reorganization of its tribes, still had one named after the Asopos. On Mykale there is also a Thebes, and Hellanikos (fr. 101) called the inhabitants of Priene Καδμεῖοι.

33. ↩ Nisa, which the Dorians later named Megara after their ancestral seats, appears in the Catalogue of Ships as Boeotian; see Homer, Untersuchungen, p. 292. Ignoring this does nothing to diminish the truth of my conclusion. As late as the end of the third century the Megarians voluntarily entered the Boeotian League and wrote in Boeotian. The Attic annexation of the wish, which led Theseus to set up a stele at the Isthmus to affirm that Ionia begins there, really ought no longer to prejudice us. It must have been invented when Athens had subdued Megara. [tr. note: The confusing phrase “annexation of the wish” preserves a deliberate density characteristic of Wilamowitz’ style. Taken literally, it means that Athens transformed a political desire—namely, to classify Megara as Ionian—into an authoritative myth.]

34. ↩ Whoever located the origin of the Hellenes in Phthiotis will, if not there, at least have lived in a land whose inhabitants claimed descent from that region. This applies to Hesiod, for the Boeotians claimed to have come from Arne in southern Thessaly, and the Aeolians of Asia, from whom Hesiod himself sprang, from Boeotia. — I have dealt with the genealogy of the Catalogues in Sitzungsberichte der Berliner Akademie, 1925, p. 52, in the introduction to Euripides’ Ion, p. 6, where I overlooked the confirmation provided by the cult of Xuthos in the Tetrapolis, IG I 190. Ion as the στρατάρχης of the Athenians is also known to Herodotus VIII 44.

35. ↩ One would like to connect Δευχαλίων with Πολυδεύχης, but even in that case the ancient equation of δευχ- with γλυχύς is unsatisfactory. Δεύχων is a proper name in Boeotia (IG VII 2559). Epicharmus (fr. 117) has Λευχαρίων, and Λεύχαρος is known to us several times as a personal name from Euboea, also from Dodona (Schwyzer, Griechische Dialektinschriften 308). “The White One” could well match “the Red One,” but of course Epicharmus may have been playing with the name.

36. ↩ One must not demand Πύρσα; what underlies it is πυρϝός, which is attested in many Doric dialects.

37. ↩ This Titan was known in antiquity only from Hesiod, and from Ω 479 (if that passage is not itself already dependent on Hesiod), so that there exist only worthless fables about him and all modern talk is idle. As the father of Deucalion he is replaced in other genealogies by the better-known Titan and friend—or father—of mankind, Prometheus. Enigmatic is the expression Δευχαλίδαι σάτυροι in Hesychius.

38. ↩ The Ἕλληνες belong together with the Σελλοί of Dodona, but they can hardly be separated from the Ἔλλοπες either; I treated this and related matters years ago in the chapter on the saga before Euripides’ Heracles.

39. ↩ It is not preserved, but it follows from the fact that even the cousins of Hellen are sons of Zeus (fr. 5).

40. ↩ The name of the nymph is not entirely certain, since it is corrupt at all the places where it is transmitted: Schol. Plat. Symp. 208d; Vitruvius IV 1 (which goes back to Ὀχρηίδος); Apollodoros I 49; Antoninus Liberalis 22. Ὀθρυίδος seemed incredible to scribes, so they altered it. Othrys appears rarely in myth, but it fits excellently that from it the Titans wage war against the Olympians (Theogony 632).

41. ↩ We shall probably have to recognize in the Minyans—who are said to have lived on Taygetos and later also in Triphylia—these pre-Dorian elements. But the legend of the settlement of Thera and Cyrene is so interwoven with other elements that the Minyans in particular remain uncertain. In Orchomenos they represent the second stratum, only subdued by the Boeotians at a late date.

42. ↩ A landing from the seaward side and a battle with the Ἀργεῖοι also occur in the singular story related by Polyaenus II 12.

43. ↩ More precisely, after the city that lay on the opposite bank near the Menelaion.

44. ↩ Herodotus repeatedly says that the Doris by Mount Parnassus had previously been inhabited by Dryopians, who elsewhere also appear as enemies of the Delphic god; Heracles drove them out. This must mean the same thing as the immigration of the Dorians.

45. ↩ Ephorus, fragment 15 Jacoby. The father is Aigimios, king of the Dorians in the Apollodoran Library (II 154). A Hesiodic poem is named after him, but from the scanty remains it cannot be determined what the title meant.

46. ↩ That they have no further subdivisions is characteristic. These arise only later in the individual communities. In Sparta the Lycurgan reform itself destroyed the clans, which in Crete stand out in dominant fashion.

47. ↩ This fits excellently with the matter, if the researches of A. von Blumenthal prove sound, who seeks to demonstrate Illyrian elements in Doric (Glotta XVIII and his studies on Hesychius). I have not yet been able to examine this myself.

48. ↩ The sea-goddess Doris in Hesiod is just as enigmatic, and wherever she appears later she derives from him. She cannot be connected with the Dorians. W. Schulze considers the name to be an abbreviation of δωρίμαχοι, but the spear is not characteristic of her, nor is there any analogy for such a formation.

49. ↩ The ancient statements about the origin of the Acarnanians are not reliable; we possess no inscriptions that are of real evidentiary value.

50. ↩ Strabo 460; whatever else has been said about the strange word cannot prevail against Apollodorus.

51. ↩ An interpolation, probably only of the sixth century, at the earliest the very end of the seventh; the Return of Odysseus, line 46.

52. ↩ It is strange that at Ε 43 Idomeneus kills a Phaistos, who nevertheless bears the name of a Cretan city, yet comes from Lydian Tarne and has Boros as his father, whose name reappears in the Milesian phyle-name Βωρεῖς. This is intelligible and shows that this phyle once included Asiatics; but Phaistos remains enigmatic, unless the poet has transferred a Cretan victory of Idomeneus to Troy.

53. ↩ Daidalos, with his speaking name, appears in the Iliad as the maker of a χορός, an ornament displaying a choral dance, of the kind that the art not of the old Cretans but certainly of the later period represents so frequently. For Ariadne—or rather Aridele (the Cretan form of the name preserved by Zenodotus)—the metal band on which the dance appeared was evidently made on account of her wondrous στέφανος, which stands as a crown in the sky. Whether Daidalos was already imprisoned in the Labyrinth at that time, like Völundur, one would like to know; otherwise he is introduced into the Iliad ad hoc. The speaking name could also have been independently coined elsewhere for masters of δαιδάλλειν. Whether a heavenly or a mortal Daidalos made Peleus his μάχαιρα, Pindar, Nemean 4.59, remains undecided.

54. ↩ That the Iliad once says Σπάρτη, at Α 52, alongside Argos as a city, is of inestimable value: the poet happens to name the two powerful cities of his own time, which did not yet exist in the age of the heroes. And yet Hera loved Sparta only for the sake of Menelaos; she was Ἀργείη. That the old city-name was Λαχεδαίμον and denoted the place where Helen was worshipped is beyond doubt. In the Laconian period it was called Θεράπνη (according to Hesychius: αὐλών, σταθμός), a word which Euripides alone favours; it was evidently introduced into poetry by the poets of the second wave of immigrants from their own language, and is thus neither pre-Greek nor specifically Doric. The hill was already for the lords of Amyklai an outlying σταθμός.

55. ↩ The clans of the Agiads and the Eurypontids were of course entirely distinct and were turned into relatives only by means of fictitious intermediate links. Among the Thessalians, only the two houses of the Skopads and the Aleuads seem to have been entitled to the leadership of the tribe, but they did not attain this dignity at the same time.

56. ↩ Strangely, there is a personal name Δωριάδας, Vollgraff, Mnemosyne 1912, p. 43.

57. ↩ Until recently we knew only an insignificant village of the Mycenaean period on the Aspis. Recently, however, Vollgraff has discovered on the Larisa a Mycenaean fortress, which can hardly have belonged to a sub-king of the lord of Mycenae; rather it was probably an advanced stronghold of the realm for observing the seaward side. The Catalogue of Ships assigns Argos to Diomedes, whose realm fits poorly with that of Agamemnon. He may already have been thought of as settled in Argos earlier because of his father Tydeus. The Thebais presupposes entirely different relations of power in the Argolid from those of the Iliad, a fact whose significance is seldom appreciated. Adrastos hardly belongs in the Argolid; he is probably a purely poetic invention, “the one who cannot escape,” the rider of the infernal horse Arion.

58. ↩ Near Mantineia such a small wooden structure had been preserved, a rarity in the time of Pausanias, VIII 10.

59. ↩ I have demonstrated this structure in Λ and σ.

60. Here, in all the “Dorian,” that is, Achaean colonizations, an earlier Ionic one has preceded, as legends from many places in Italy prove—legends to which historians have paid little attention. The same holds true for Corcyra. But even apart from this, one must recognize that Rhegion and Cumae are inconceivable without intermediate stages along the coastal route. The cities around the Gulf of Naples only later lost their Ionic character to the Italic peoples, just as the latest foundations, Hyele and Massalia, had brought Ionic culture to Celts and Iberians.

61. ↩ ὥσπερ λεχὼ στρατιῶτις ἐξ Ἰωνίας says Eupolis.

62. ↩ I have assembled them in my essay on the Ionian migration, Sitzungsberichte 1906.

63. ↩ The Μαιάνδριοι of the tribute lists, who soon disappear within them, must presumably have detached themselves from the city of Magnesia.

64. ↩ This will be due to the fact that emigration from Thessaly went predominantly toward the mainland. Achilles lives on in the epic; Lesbos he only ravaged and carried off the girl from Brisa. In the biographical romance the mother of Homer comes from Thessaly. In contrast to the Lesbian, the epic has preserved the Thessalian genitive in -οιο. Nor is it without significance that, according to Sappho, the Atreidai founded a temple on Lesbos only on their return journey, that is, as they passed by, whereas in Kyme a king is called Agamemnon.

65. ↩ Here Hellenic names are almost entirely absent. Only the city of Melie, destroyed at an early date, forms an exception; it no longer lay on the coast and must have therefore had a later foundation, wiped out without a trace by its sister cities.

66. ↩ Colophon, Airai (Lolchfeld), Erythrai, Klazomenai—these were founded relatively late. Lebedos must have become independent only at a late stage, perhaps not until after the conquest of Ephesos by the Cimmerians, for one of the tribes of Ephesos bears the name Λεβεδεῖς.

67. ↩ Callimachus, Iambi 224, with Pfeiffer’s note. Branchos as the son of Machaireus is an invention intended to elevate Delphi above Didyma. The Artemis Πυθείη seems to serve the same purpose.

68. ↩ Hessos–Assos, Lyrnessos, Imbros, Samos, Zerynthos, Abdera (ὡς Βριχίνδηρα).

69. ↩ On Mount Kynthos, bowls have been found in Carian huts in which red pigment had been ground, and the editor Plassart conjectures that they were used for painting the body. In that case the Carians would indeed have deserved to be called φοίνιχες.

70. ↩ This is told of Skepsis and Kebrene. The epic has introduced Pelasgians as enemies, perhaps also transferred the name Larisa, alongside them the Keteioi; these at least are Mysians. Pergamon must once have been Hellenic, since Telephos could be made into an Arcadian; his son Eurypylos comes to the aid of the Trojans, though this is admittedly a late invention.

71. ↩ Extensive tracts of land were royal estates of the Persians and of the Macedonian kings, their legal successors. We see how Alexander transferred such properties together with their inhabitants to Priene, and Ptolemy to Milet.

72. ↩ Because the Hellenic λαοί denote the levy of warriors, ληίζεσθαι comes to mean to ravage, ληίς to mean booty, and ληιστής pirate—a usage that points back to a time when seaborne raiding was practised by cities and their rulers, as Polycrates still did.

73. ↩ A Boros falls on the Trojan side at Ε 44; the poet of II 177, who gives this name to a Macedonian, has forgotten that it was a foreign name. On the riddle posed by the Achaean hero who is called Teukros, although the Teukrians are not mentioned, see Homer und Ilias 49.

74. ↩ Nestor advises that the order of battle be arranged χατὰ φυλὰς χαὶ φρήτρας, B 362. Yet one hears scarcely anything of the brotherhoods, until in late times the name comes to denote merely a club, essentially for communal meals.

75. ↩ The validity of the three Doric phylai on Kos stands in contrast to this: there the settlement took place in a well-organised movement, like a formal colonial foundation. On Rhodes, by contrast, the phylai—that is, in the three cities that were initially independent—were abandoned, and later institutions were created to take their place.

76. ↩ Thus, on the large island of Samos, as it appears, all genuine villages are lacking—very much in contrast to Chios, where, for example, Bolissos appears in the Homeric legend and has survived down to the present day. In Milesian territory there is such a place, Assessos. At Teichiussa, at the beginning of the sixth century, there is a city-lord in residence, that is, an independent ruler.

77. ↩ Whether individual Doric features are nevertheless to be found among them—which is possible in matters of vocabulary—must be investigated. One might think of δρᾶν, but here Regenbogen has perceptively pointed to the influence of the Sicilian physicians.

78. ↩ This was known to the author of the Catalogue of Ships, but he now named the leader Θέσσαλος, a name which in fact designates the tribe before which the settlers of Cos had given way.

79. ↩ Halasarna and Pele, which Theocritus transposes into Acharnai and Ptelea; for him the Attic Acharnai was of course Greek. The cult of Apollo predominates. Heracles came from the Argolid.

80. ↩ Among genuinely Hellenic gods on Rhodes and the dependent islands of Karpathos and Nisyros, only Poseidon is of real importance; on Nisyros he is called Ἀργεῖος (IG XII 3, 103). Hera is strikingly marginal. The Athena of Lindos is pre-Greek, and Artemis Κεχοία will be so as well. Apollo is called Karneios: in this the Doric character is expressed; otherwise he is Delian or Pythian. The Asiatic god was therefore not present here, an important contrast to Lycia and to Kos. That Zeus received the Atabyrion goes without saying, but he can hardly have been its original possessor.

81. ↩ IG II 1108, II 128. The relief belonging to the second document is published in Schoene, Greek Reliefs no. 98.

82. ↩ Scholion on Dionysius Periegetes 525, a very rare piece.

83. ↩ Here, alongside Hephaistos, there appears a μεγάλη θεός, also named in the only inscription from Halonnesos; she was probably called Lemnos, and perhaps Hekataios already reported that virgins were once sacrificed to her (Stephanos of Byzantium s.v.). Aristophanes had mentioned her in the Λήμνιαι, which the grammarians connected to the Thracian Bendis. It is scarcely possible to think of the Asiatic Mother of the Gods; a Thracian connection would be more acceptable. She has nothing to do with the Hellenic Earth Mother, who can also be called μεγάλη.

84. ↩ At Alexis Παρασίτωι, someone prays, τὰ Σαμοθράιχια λῆξαι πνέοντα, which Casaubon rightly interprets as a north-east storm; in such a situation it was natural to invoke the gods of the island, so that their identification with the Dioscuri becomes intelligible.

85. ↩ At N 685 the name Ἰάονες occurs in a very late interpolation (cf. Homer und Ilias 227). The epic rightly avoided a name which had meanwhile come into currency, because it felt every allusion to the Hellenic settlement of Asia to be an anachronism.

86. ↩ When the Spartan king Cleomenes claims to be an Achaean because he descends from Heracles, this does not mean that Heracles was a descendant of Achaios; what mattered was the contrast with the Dorians, and for that purpose the name of the tribe that, according to Hesiod, had inhabited Sparta before them readily suggested itself.

87. ↩ This is also the case in the Attic Tetrapolis, which is decisive for Boeotian Achaia: IG II² 1358 b, line 27.

88. ↩ It is a relief that the much-favoured interpretation of the Achaiwasha — or whatever the name, as transcribed among the Sea Peoples of the time of Merneptah, may actually have sounded — has been definitively disposed of; for these people were circumcised (Ed. Meyer, Geschichte II², 559). They therefore cannot have been Hellenes, who at all times distinguished themselves from barbarians precisely by the fact that they did not mutilate their bodies in any way. This insight entitles us to regard the other identifications as equally non-binding, in which the desire to discover Achaeans or Sardinians or Danaans had guided the course of interpretation.

89. ↩ On the Aeolian coast there was an Ἀχαιῶν λιμήν (Strabo 622); Ἀχαιῶν ἀχτή was the name of the coast of Cypriot Salamis (Strabo 682), Achaean-Greek in contrast to the Phoenicians. Ἀχαία seems to have been the name of the citadel of Ialysos, at least the topography points to this, as Hiller shows on IG XII 1, 677. One must then, however, reject the testimony of the Rhodian Zenon in Diodorus V 57, who calls Azala a πόλις ἐν τῆι Ἰαλυσίαι, or else Diodorus must be reporting Zenon incorrectly. I posed this dilemma long ago in Hermes XIV 457. The designation will be pre-Dorian, in the same sense as in the case of the Salaminian harbour, for the city of Ialysos was barbarian.

90. ↩ Since Abderos is descended from a nymph Thronia, the Locrians of Thronion must at some point have attempted to establish themselves at that hotly contested site.

91. ↩ He must have been an indigenous god whose cult statue Bryaxis made for Sinope, and which was then transferred by Ptolemy to Alexandria as Sarapis.

92. ↩ In Psophis (Pausanias VIII 24, 6). Aeschylus brought the Palici onto the stage only for Hieron in Syracuse. The originally Sicel Demeter of Enna, together with the localization of the abduction of Persephone in Sicily, became popular only through Callimachus, who in this, as in much else, followed the Siceliote Timaeus.

93. ↩ Herodotus III 37. The name Pataikos was adopted early, for it appears in the genealogy of the Emmenidae (Herodotus VII 154) and then occurs sporadically down to Menander’s Perikeiromene. Evidently, to the Greeks it meant “dwarf.”

94. ↩ Somewhere on Cyprus he was called Gauas (Lycophron 831), in Perge Ἀβώβας (Hesychius). The Phoenician name that gained currency among the Hellenes therefore does not coincide with the distribution of the cult. Attis, too, is in fact the same figure.