Man, Past and Present - Agustus Henry Keane, A. Hingston Quiggin, Alfred Court Haddon (most popular novels txt) 📗

the stress of a peculiarly stimulating and yet hardening environment, has retained through every stage of development an unusual degree of the endowment of fresh youth, of elemental savagery, with which it started. This explains the fine qualities of Spain and her defects, the splendid initiative, and lack of sustained ability to carry it out, the importance of the point of honour and the glorification of the primitive virtue of valour.

In Italy the past and present relations, as elucidated especially by Livi and Sergi, may be thus briefly stated. After the first Stone Age, of which there are fewer indications than might be expected[1275], the whole land was thickly settled by dark long-headed Mediterranean peoples in neolithic times. These were later joined by Pelasgians of like type from Greece, and by Illyrians of doubtful affinity from the Balkan Peninsula. Indeed C. Penka[1276], who has so many paradoxical theories, makes the Illyrians the first inhabitants of Italy, as shown by the striking resemblance of the terramara culture of Aemilia with that of the Venetian and Laibach pile-dwellings. The recent finds in Bosnia also[1277], besides the historically proved (?) migration of the Siculi from Upper Italy to Sicily, and their Illyrian origin, all point in the same direction. But the facts are differently interpreted by Sergi[1278], who holds that the whole land was occupied by the Mediterraneans, because we find even in Switzerland pile-dwellers of the same type[1279].

Then came the peoples of Aryan speech, Celtic-speaking Alpines from the north-west and Slavs from the north-east, who raised the cephalic index in the north, where the brachy element, as already seen, still greatly predominates but diminishes steadily southwards[1280]. They occupied the whole of Umbria, which at first stretched across the peninsula from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, but was later encroached upon by the intruding Etruscans on the west side. Then also some of these Umbrians, migrating southwards to Latium beyond the Tiber, intermingled, says Sergi, with the Italic (Ligurian) aborigines, and became the founders of the Roman state[1281]. With the spread of the Roman arms the Latin language, which Sergi claims to be a kind of Aryanised Ligurian, but must be regarded as a true member of the Aryan family, was diffused throughout the whole of the peninsula and islands, sweeping away all traces not only of the original Ligurian and other Mediterranean tongues, but also of Etruscan and its own sister languages, such as Umbrian, Oscan, and Sabellian.

At the fall of the empire the land was overrun by Ostrogoths, Heruli, and other Teutons, none of whom formed permanent settlements except the Longobards, who gave their name to the present Lombardy, but were themselves rapidly assimilated in speech and general culture to the surrounding populations, whom we may now call Italians in the modern sense of the term.

When it is remembered that the Aegean culture had spread to Italy at an early date, that it was continued under Hellenic influences by Etruscans and Umbrians, that Greek arts and letters were planted on Italian soil (Magna Graecia) before the foundation of Rome, that all these civilisations converged in Rome itself and were thence diffused throughout the West, that the traditions of previous cultural epochs never died out, acquired new life with the Renascence and were thus perpetuated to the present day, it may be claimed for the gifted Italian people that they have been for a longer period than any others under the unbroken sway of general humanising influences.

These "Latin Peoples," as they are called because they all speak languages of the Latin stock, are not confined to the West. To the Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, with the less known and ruder Walloon of Belgium and Romansch of Switzerland, Tyrol, and Friuli, must be associated the Rumanian current amongst some nine millions of so-called "Daco-Rumanians" in Moldavia and Wallachia, i.e. the modern kingdom of Rumania. The same Neo-Latin tongue is also spoken by the Tsintsars or Kutzo-Vlacks[1282] of the Mount Pindus districts in the Balkan Peninsula, and by numerous Rumanians who have in later times migrated into Hungary. They form a compact and vigorous nationality, who claim direct descent from the Roman military colonists settled north of the Lower Danube by Trajan after his conquest of the Dacians (107 A.D.). But great difficulties attach to this theory, which is rejected by many ethnologists, especially on the ground that, after Trajan's time, Dacia was repeatedly swept clean by the Huns, the Finns, the Avars, Magyars and other rude Mongolo-Turki hordes, besides many almost ruder Slavic peoples during the many centuries when the eastern populations were in a state of continual flux after the withdrawal of the Roman legionaries from the Lower Danube. Besides, it is shown by Roesler[1283] and others that under Aurelian (257 A.D.) Trajan's colonists withdrew bodily southwards to and beyond the Hemus to the territory of the old Bessi (Thracians), i.e. the district still occupied by the Macedo-Rumanians. But in the 13th century, during the break-up of the Byzantine empire, most of these fugitives were again driven north to their former seats beyond the Danube, where they have ever since held their ground, and constituted themselves a distinct and far from feeble branch of the Neo-Latin community. The Pindus, therefore, rather than the Carpathians, is to be taken as the last area of dispersion of these valiant and intelligent descendants of the Daco-Romans. This seems the most rational solution of what A. D. Xenopol calls "an historic enigma," although he himself rejects Roesler's conclusions in favour of the old view so dear to the national pride of the present Rumanian people[1284]. The composite character of the Rumanian language--fundamentally Neo-Latin or rather early Italian, with strong Illyrian (Albanian) and Slav affinities--would almost imply that Dacia had never been Romanised under the empire, and that in fact this region was for the first timeoccupied by its present Romance speaking inhabitants in the 13th century[1285]. The nomadic life of the Rumanians is in itself, as Peisker points out[1286], a refutation of their descent from settled Roman colonists, and indicates a Central Asiatic origin. The mounted nomads grazed during the summer "on most of the mountains of the Balkan peninsula, and took up their winter quarters on the sea-coasts among a peasant population speaking a different language. Thence they gradually spread, unnoticed by the chroniclers, along all the mountain ranges, over all the Carpathians of Transylvania, North Hungary, and South Galicia, to Moravia; towards the north-west from Montenegro onwards over Herzegovina, Bosnia, Istria, as far as South Styria; towards the south over Albania far into Greece.... And like the peasantry among which they wintered (and winter) long enough, they became (and become) after a transitory bilingualism, Greeks, Albanians, Servians, Bulgarians, Ruthenians, Poles, Slovaks, Chekhs, Slovenes, Croatians ... a mobile nomad stratum among a strange-tongued and more numerous peasant element, and not till later did they gradually take to agriculture and themselves become settled."

The Pelasgians and Minoan civilisation have been briefly discussed above (Ch. XIII.). Later problems in Greek ethnology are still under dispute. Sergi, who regards the proto-Aryans as round-headed barbarians of Celtic, Slav, and Teutonic speech, makes no exception in favour of the Hellenes. These also enter Greece not as civilisers, but rather as destroyers of the flourishing Mykenaean culture developed here, as in Italy, by the Mediterranean aborigines. But in course of time the intruders become absorbed in the Pelasgic or eastern branch of the Mediterraneans, and what we call Hellenism is really Pelasgianism revived, and to some extent modified by the Aryan (Hellenic) element.

If it may be allowed that at their advent the Hellenes were less civilised than the native Aegeans on whom they imposed their Aryan speech, whence and when came they? By Penka[1287], for whom the Baltic lands would be the original home not merely of the Germanic branch but of all the Aryans, the Hellenic cradle is located in the Oder basin between the Elbe and the Vistula. As the Doric, doubtless the last Greek irruption into Hellas, is chronologically fixed at 1149 B.C., the beginning of the Hellenic migrations may be dated back to the 13th century. When the Hellenes migrated from Central Europe to Greece, the period of the general ethnic dispersion was already closed, and the migratory period which next followed began with the Hellenes, and was continued by the Itali, Gauls, Germans, etc. The difficulties created by this view are insurmountable. Thus we should have to suppose that from this relatively contracted Aryan cradle countless tribes swarmed over Europe since the 13th century B.C., speaking profoundly different languages (Greek, Celtic, Latin, etc.), all differentiated since that time on the shores of the Baltic. The proto-Aryans with their already specialised tongues had reached the shores of the Mediterranean long before that time and, according to Maspero[1288], were known to the Egyptians of the 5th dynasty (3990-3804 B.C.) if not earlier. Allowing that these may have rather been pre-Hellenes (Pelasgians), we still know that the Achaeans had traditionally arrived about 1250 B.C. and they were already speaking the language of Homer.

"The indications of archaeology and of legend agree marvellously well with those of the Egyptian records," says H. R. Hall[1289], "in making the Third Late Minoan period one of incessant disturbance.... The whole basin of the Eastern Mediterranean seems to have been a seething turmoil of migrations, expulsions, wars and piracies, started first by the Mycenaean (Achaian) conquest of Crete, and then intensified by the constant impulse of the Northern iron-users into Greece." Herodotus speaks of the great invasion of the Thesprotian tribes from beyond Pindus, which took place probably in the 13th century B.C.[1290] As a result "an overwhelming Aryan and iron-using population was first brought into Greece. The earlier Achaian (?) tribes of Aryans in Thessaly, who had perhaps lived there from time immemorial, and had probably already infiltrated southwards to form the mixed Ionian population about the Isthmus, were scattered, only a small portion of the nation remaining in its original home, while of the rest part conquered the South and another part emigrated across the sea to the Phrygian coast. Of this emigration to Asia the first event must have been the war of Troy.... The Boeotian and Achaian invasion of the South scattered the Minyae, Pelasgians, and Ionians. The remnant of the Minyae emigrated to Lemnos, the Pelasgi and Ionians were concentrated in Attica and another body of Ionians in the later Achaia, while the Southern Achaeans pressed forward into the Peloponnese[1291]."

It is evident from the national traditions that the proto-Greeks did not arrive en bloc, but rather at intervals in separate and often hostile bands bearing different names. But all these groups--Achaeans, Danai, Argians, Dolopes, Myrmidons, Leleges and many others, some of which were also found in Asia Minor--retained a strong sense of their common origin. The sentiment, which may be called racial rather than national, received ultimate expression when to all of them was extended the collective name of Hellenes (Sellenes originally), that is, descendants of Deucalion's son Hellen, whose two sons Aeolus and Dorus, and grandson Ion, were supposed to be the progenitors of the Aeolians, Dorians, and Ionians. But such traditions are merely reminiscences of times when the tribal groupings still prevailed, and it may be taken for granted that the three main branches of the Hellenic stock did not spring from a particular family that rose to power in comparatively recent times in the Thessalian district of Phthiotis. Whatever truth may lie behind the Hellenic legend, it is highly probable that, at the time when Hellen is said to have flourished (about 1500 B.C.), the Aeolic-speaking communities of Thessaly, Arcadia, Boeotia, the closely-allied Dorians[1292] of Phocaea, Argos, and Laconia, and the Ionians of Attica, had already been clearly specialised, had in fact formed special groups before entering Greece. Later their dialects, after acquiring a certain polish and leaving some imperishable records of the many-sided Greek genius, were gradually merged in the literary Neo-Ionic or Attic, which thus became the [Greek: koine dialektos], or current speech of the Greek