HELLENIC MIGRATIONS

13

The

were afterwards known as Macedonians. Thracian tribes whom they displaced were, like themselves, Aryan, but not in any nearer sense akin to the Hellenes. From the west, moving southward, came other immigrants, who occupied Epeirus, Acarnania, and Aetolia. They displaced the Hellenes there, of whom the Selloi at Dodona were an isolated survival; and they partly obliterated that old Hellenic civilization which can be dimly traced in the heroic legends of Aetolia. A branch of this northwestern immigration passed over into western Peloponnesus, where the settlers in the upper valley of the Peneus came to be known as Eleans, or "Dalesmen."

A third movement took its rise in the centre of the Balkan peninsula, from the forests and upland valleys of northern Pindus. Thence came the primitive "Boeotians," "Thessalians," and "Dorians." The Boeotians issued forth into the land afterwards called Thessaly, and thence, under the pressure of their kinsmen, into Boeotia. Both in Thessaly and in Boeotia the immigrants found an old Hellenic civilization. But the Thessalian aristocracy never acquired more than a tinge of it. The Boeotians assimilated it more largely, though not completely. When the Dorians first appear in history, they have already advanced southwards as far as the highlands north of Parnassus, and possess the sanctuary of the old Hellenic god Apollo at Delphi.

Meanwhile the primitive Hellenes, displaced by these manifold forces, had sought other homes. Some had settled in the islands of the Aegean, or on the coasts of Asia Minor. There they came into collision with other tribes of Indo-European descent, which appear under the collective name of Carians, and were for the most part conquered or absorbed. Other Hellenes passed into Peloponnesus. Under these new conditions, the old divisions of the Hellenes into small tribes were lost, and were replaced by larger aggregates, which may be considered as small nations within the Hellenic nationality, the Aeolian and the Ionian.

It does not fall within my scope to enter upon any detailed discussion as to the origin of the Homeric poems. But I am bound to state the outlines of my belief. I hold that the original nucleus of the Iliad was due to a single Achaean poet, living in Thessaly before the immigration which partly displaced the primitive Hellenes there. This primary Iliad may have been as old as the eleventh century B. C. It was afterwards brought by Achaean emigrants to Ionia, and there enlarged by successive Ionian poets. The original nucleus of the Odyssey was also composed, probably, in Greece proper, before the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus; was carried to Ionia by emigrants whom the conquerors drove out; and was there expanded into an epic which blends the local traits of its origin with the spirit of Ionian adventure and Ionian society.

closed in the

The Iliad is, for us, the first articulate utterance of the Hellenic race, and the oldest The Hellenic picture of Hellenic life. Remembering mind as disthe salient characteristics of ancient Iliad. Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Phoenicia, let us inquire what are the new tendencies or qualities which the Iliad reveals in this new race.

Religion.

In the first place,-how foreign to all the sacerdotal traditions of the East is the Hellenic manner of dealing with religion! The Hellenic gods and goddesses are glorified men and women, human in love, hate, and guile, superhuman in power and in beauty; they speak the same language as the human heroes,-noble, yet simple and direct; the poet fearlessly relates, for all to hear who will listen, what these deities say to each other as they feast, or debate, or quarrel, in their Olympian home; when the gods are angry, they are propitiated in the open light of day by all the folk, with dance and song and sacrifice; there is no dark symbolism, no occult ritual; there are no animal forms, no hybrid monsters, representative of dread agencies hostile to man; the hundred-headed Typhon has been vanquished by Zeus, and is a prisoner beneath the earth; Cerberus is merely the watchdog of Hades. Nor is any prominence given to priests as overseers and interpreters of religion. Priests, in the plural number, are mentioned only twice in the Iliad (9. 575, 24. 221), and both times with reference to local or special rites. We also hear

of Apollo's priest at Chryse in the Troad (Il. 1. 37), and at Ismarus in Thrace (Od. 9. 198), but he is merely the guardian of the local shrine. Religion has now its central seat, not in the authoritative lore of a priesthood, not in a close corporation which jealously guards its secrets, but in the free consciousness of the people, who turn for enlightenment only occasionally, at moments of doubt or difficulty, to the soothsayer, the expert in omens. At public sacrifices, the king, as head of the state, takes the foremost part, just as the head of the family does in private worship. The hieratic spirit has given place to the lay spirit. The layman, working as an artist, has asserted the right of the plastic mind over the conception of the deity; has invested it with the highest beauty that he could imagine; and has made that series. of divine types the perpetual possession of his race. To the priesthood of Egypt, or of Babylonia and Assyria, such a treatment of religion would have seemed an audacious impiety, which robbed sacred lore of its mystery, and thereby of its strongest hold upon the hopes or fears of mankind. Nevertheless, no lay disciple of those priesthoods can have felt a truer reverence for the divine than is manifested by the Greek warrior of the Iliad and the Greek wanderer of the Odyssey.

Not less striking is the contrast between the type of monarchy which had prevailed in the East and that which is disclosed by Homer. The

Government.

Homeric poems give less prominence to the extent of the royal power than to the provisions for justice and for reasonable liberty by which that power is limited. It belongs to the very essence of Homeric kingship that the king is the divinely appointed guardian of those dooms or precedents, themistes, on which the rights of his subjects are founded. To give crooked judgments is the mark of a bad king, who will not escape the vengeance of the gods. The king lays business before his council of elders; the public assembly includes all the freemen of the realm. The Asiatic type of monarchy was, like the Hellenic, constitutional. But Aristotle expresses the difference in Greek terms when he describes the Asiatic monarchy as a constitutional tyranny, tolerated by Asiatics because they were, in his phrase, “more servile by nature;" while he conceives the Greek monarchy as originally a reward conferred upon some signal benefactor of the people, and then continued to the benefactor's descendants. The Greek monarchy of the heroic age is far indeed from that conception of the State which the Greek mind afterwards developed; yet it carries within it the seeds of such a State; the promise of political growth is there, and the spirit of Western civilization.

Thus the Hellenes stand forth, at this early moment, as already exempt from both the forms of despotism which had benumbed or paralyzed human progress in the East. They wear the yoke. neither of priests nor of kings.