The Ethnology of Europe
by R. G. Latham · English · Gutenberg #43510 · 411,566 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Ethnology of Europe
Author: R. G. Latham
Release date: August 19, 2013 [eBook #43510]
Language: English
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THE
ETHNOLOGY OF EUROPE.
THE
ETHNOLOGY OF EUROPE.
BY
R. G. LATHAM, M.D.,
ETC.
[Illustration: colophon]
LONDON:
JOHN VAN VOORST, PATERNOSTER ROW.
M.DCCC.LII.
LONDON:
Printed by SAMUEL BENTLEY and Co.,
Bangor House, Shoe Lane.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Preliminary Observations.--The Physical Peculiarities of
Europe.--General Sketch of its Ethnology.--Statement of Problems.--The
Skipetar, or Albanians.--Their Language, Descent.--The Four Tribes.--How
far a Pure Stock.--Elements of Intermixture......1
CHAPTER II.
Spain and Portugal.--The Euskaldunac, or Basques.--The Iberian
Stock.--The Turdetanian Civilization.--Phœnician, Roman, Vandal, Gothic
Elements.--Keltiberians.--The Original Keltæ Iberians.--The Word
“Keltic” of Iberian Origin.--The Arab Conquest.--Expulsion of the
Arabs.--The Jews of Spain.--Gipsies.--Physical and Moral Characteristics
of the Modern Spaniards.--Portugal......21
CHAPTER III.
France.--Iberian Blood in Gaul as well as the Spanish
Peninsula.--Iberians of Gascony, &c.--Ligurians.--How far
Keltic.--Bodencus.--Intermixture.--Roman, German,
Arab.--Alsatia.--Lorraine.--Franche-Comté.--Burgundy, Southern, Western,
and Northern France.--Character of the Kelts.--The Albigensian
Crusade.--Belgium.--Its Elements.--Keltic, German, and
Roman.--Switzerland.--Helvetia.--Romance, French, and German
Languages......47
CHAPTER IV.
Italy.--Ligurians.--Etruscans.--Venetians and
Liburnians.--Umbrians.--Ausonians.--Latins.--Earliest Populations of
North-Eastern Italy.--South Italians.--Italian Origin of the
Greeks.--Sicilians.--Elements of
Admixture.--Herulian.--Gothic.--Lombard.--Arab.--Norman.--Analytical
Sketch of the Population of Modern Italy......80
CHAPTER V.
Importance of Clearness of Idea respecting the Import of the Word
“Race.”--The Pelasgi.--Area of Homeric Greece.--Acarnania not
Hellenic.--The Dorians.--Egyptian, Semitic, and other
Influences.--Historical Greece.--Macedonians.--Greece under Rome and
Byzantium.--Inroads of Barbarians.--The Slavonic Conquest.--Recent
Elements of Admixture......125
CHAPTER VI.
Russian Populations Sarmatian and Turanian.--Samoeids
Turanian.--Ugrians.--Lapps.--Kwains.--Esthonians.--Liefs.--Permians.
--Siranians.--Votiaks.--Tsheremiss, Tshuvatsh, Morduin.--Lithuanians.
--Malorussians and Muscovites.--Their recent Introduction.--The
Skoloti.--Early Displacements.--Ugrian Glosses.--Indian Affinities
of the Lithuanic.--Russian Poland.--Analytical View of the Present
Populations of Russia.--Arkhangel.--Finland.--Esthonia.--Livonia.
--Perm.--Simbirsk, Penza.--Lithuania.--Volhynia.--Kharkhov.--Kosaks.
--Kherson.--Taurida......146
CHAPTER VII.
Wallachia and Moldavia.--Rumanyos.--Descent from the Daci.--Sarmatian
Origin.--Servia.--Montenegro.....182
CHAPTER VIII.
Frisian, Saxon, Dutch, and Gothic Germans.--Germanized
Kelts.--Germanized Slaves.--Prussia.--Isolation of its Areas.--East and
West Prussia.--Prussian Poland.--Pomerania.--Prussian Silesia.--Prussian
Saxony.--Brandenburg.--Uckermark.--South-Western Portion.--Westphalian
and Rhenish Prussia.--Mecklenburg.--Saxony.--Linones of
Luneburg.--Hanover and Oldenburg.--Holland.--Hesse-Cassel,
Hesse-Darmstadt, Nassau.--Baden.--Wurtemburg.--Weimar.--Rhenish
Bavaria.--Danubian Bavaria......187
CHAPTER IX.
Great Britain.--Denmark.--The Islands.--The
Vithesleth.--Fyen.--Lauenburg.--Holstein.--Sleswick.--Jutland.--Iceland.
--The Feroe Isles.--Norway.--Sweden.--Lapps.--Kwains.--Gothlanders.
--Angermannians.--Theory of the Scandinavian Population......199
CHAPTER X.
Rumelia.--The Turk Stock.--Zones of Conquest.--Early Intrusions of Turk
Populations Westward.--Thracians.--The Ancient Macedonians.--The Pelasgi
of Macedonia.--Bosnia, Herzegovna and Turkish
Croatia.--Bulgaria......221
CHAPTER XI.
Austria.--Bukhovinia, Gallicia, and Lodomiria.--Bohemia and
Moravia.--Austrian
Silesia.--Dalmatia.--Croatia.--Carniola.--Carinthia.--Styria.--Saltzburg,
the Tyrol, the Vorarlberg.--Upper and Lower Austria.--Hungary......238
ERRATUM. (corrected by etext transcriber.)
Page 3, line 6, _for_ greater _read_ less.
ETHNOLOGY OF EUROPE.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.--THE PHYSICAL PECULIARITIES OF
EUROPE.--GENERAL SKETCH OF ITS ETHNOLOGY.--STATEMENT OF
PROBLEMS.--THE SKIPETAR, OR ALBANIANS.--THEIR LANGUAGE,
DESCENT.--THE FOUR TRIBES.--HOW FAR A PURE STOCK.--ELEMENTS OF
INTERMIXTURE.
The proper introduction to the ethnology of Europe is the following
series of preliminaries:--
1. The physical peculiarities of the quarter of the world so called;
2. A general view of the stocks, families, or races which occupy it;
3. A statement of the chief problems connected with the Natural History
of its populations.
1. The physical conditions of Europe are as remarkable in respect to
their negative as their positive characters; in other words, there is a
great number of points wherein Europe differs from Asia, Africa,
America, and Polynesia, in respect to what it has _not_, as well as in
respect to what it _has_.
These negative points will be treated first.
_a._ No part of Europe lies between the Tropics; so that the luxuriance
of a spontaneous and varied vegetation, with its pernicious tendencies
to incline the habits of its population to idleness, is wanting. The
rank and rapid growth of the plants which serve as food to men and
animals, and which dispense with labour, nowhere occurs.
_b._ No part comes under the class of Steppes; or, at most, but
imperfectly approaches their character. In Asia, the vast table-lands of
the centre, occupied by the Turks and Mongols, have ever been the cradle
of an active, locomotive, hungry, and aggressive population. And these
have seen, with a strong desire to possess, the more favoured areas of
the south; and have conquered them accordingly. The Luneburg Heath, and
parts of Hanover are the nearest resemblances to the great Steppes of
Mongolia, and Independent Tartary; but they are on a small and beggarly
scale. In Russia, where the land is flat and level, the ground is also
fertile, so that agriculture has been practicable, and (being
practicable) has bound the occupant to the soil, instead of mounting him
on fleet horses to wander with his flocks and herds from spot to spot,
to become a shepherd by habit, and a warrior by profession; for in all
countries, shepherds and hunters are marauders on a small, and
conquerors on a large scale.
_c._ Europe is narrowest in its northern parts. This has had the effect
of limiting those populations of the colder climes, whose scanty means
of subsistence at home, incline them to turn their faces southwards,
with the view of conquest, and supply them with numbers to effect their
purpose.
_d._ Its diameter from north to south is less than its diameter from
east to west. This has kept the mass of its population within a similar
climate; or, if not within a similar climate, within a range of
temperature far less wide than that which separates the African, the
American, or the Asiatic of the northern parts of their respective
continents from the Hottentot of the Cape, the Fuegian of Cape Horn, and
the Malay of the Malayan Peninsula. It has given uniformity to its
occupants; since varieties increase as we proceed from south to north,
but not as we go from east to west--or _vice versâ_.
Amongst its positive features the most remarkable are connected with its
mountain-ranges, the extent of its sea-board, and the direction of its
rivers.
_a._ In no country are the great levels more broken by mountains, or the
great mountains more in contiguity to considerable tracts of level
country. The effect of this is to give the different characters of the
Mountaineer and the Lowlander more opportunity of acting and reacting on
each other.
_b._ In no country are the coasts more indented. We may look in vain
for such a sea-board as that of Greece, elsewhere. The effect of this is
to give the different characters of the sailor and landsman, the
producer and the trader, more opportunity of acting and reacting on each
other.
_c._ Its greatest rivers fall into seas navigable throughout the year.
Contrast with this the great rivers of Asia, the Obi, the Lena, the
Yenesey, and others, which for the purposes of navigation are useless;
falling, as they do, into an Arctic sea.
_d._ Our greatest river, the Danube, runs from east to west. This
ensures a homogeneous character for the population along its banks.
Contrast with this the Nile, the Missisippi, and the Yenesey, in all of
which the simple effect of climate creates a difference between the
populations of the source and the embouchure. The great rivers of China
do the same as the Danube; but the Danube differs from them, and from
all other rivers running in a like direction, in emptying itself into an
inland sea; a sea which gives the opportunity of communication not only
with the parts north and south of the rivers which fall into it, but
with those to the east of it also. The Hoang-ho and Kiang-ku empty
themselves into an ocean, that, in these days of steam communication,
leads to America, but which in the infancy of the world led to a
coasting trade only, or, at most, to a large island--Japan. The Baltic
and Mediterranean act, to a certain degree, in the same manner. The one
has Africa, the other Scandinavia, to ensure its being put to the uses
of trade.
In no part of the world do the differences between the varieties of the
human species lie within narrower limits than in Europe. The most
extreme opponents to the doctrine of the unity of our kind have never
made many species out of the European specimens of the genus _Homo_. And
these are by no means of the most satisfactory sort.
They are unsatisfactory for the following reasons. The differences that
are inferred from dissimilarity of language, are neutralised by an
undoubted similarity of physical form. The dissimilarities that are
inferred from peculiarities of physical form are neutralised by
undeniable affinities of speech. Looking to his size and colour, the
Laplander is far, very far, removed from the Fin. Yet the languages
belong to one and the same class. Looking to their tongues, the Basque
of the Pyrenees, and the Skipetar (or Albanian of Albania) are each
isolated populations. Yet their form is but slightly different from
those of the other Europeans.
Now the physical condition of our continent makes the intermixture of
blood, and the diffusion of ideas easy: and, I believe, that the effects
of both are more notable in Europe than elsewhere.
2. The families, stocks, or races, which occupy Europe will be taken in
the order which is most convenient; so that it will be practical rather
than scientific.
_a._ In Malta the language is Arabic, and, of course, to a certain
extent, the blood also. But Malta is European only in respect to its
political relations. Still its population requires notice.
_b._ The Osmanlis, or Turks of Turkey, are Asiatic rather than European;
an intrusive population whose introduction is within its historical
period. I will not say, however, that in the parts between the Dnieper
and Don, members of the same great stock may not have been settled in
the times anterior to history. In the following pages, the Turks of
Europe will be called Osmanlis, or Ottomans: since the word _Turk_ is a
generic name applied to the family to which they, along with the
Independent Tartars, the Uzbeks, the Turcomans, the Turks of Asia Minor,
the Yakuts on the borders of the Icy Sea, and several other great
branches, extending to the frontier of China, and the mouth of the Lena,
belong. The Turk is European, as the New Englander is American; _i.e._,
not strictly so.
_c._ To a certain extent this foreign origin must be attributed to a
member of the next family--the Majiar of Hungary. He conquered his
present occupancy in the tenth century. He differs, however, from the
Turk, in belonging to a class, group, or stock of populations which,
although Asiatic to a great extent, is European as well. This is the
stock which is called--
The Ugrian, a stock which is the only one common to both Europe and
Asia, and contains the Lapps, the Finlanders, the Esthonians, and some
other smaller populations on the European feeders of the Volga. The
particular branch, however, from which the Majiars were derived is
Asiatic.
The next two stocks consist of a single family each, and they are
mentioned together because they are so isolated as to have no known
affinities either with each, or with any other population. These are--
_d._ The Basques of Biscay and Gascony, _i.e._, the Western Pyrenees;
once spread over the whole of the Spanish peninsula, and for that reason
commonly called Iberian--
_e._ The Skipetar, or Albanians of Albania.
I am taking, as aforesaid, the populations in the order of convenience,
and the next is
_f._ The Keltic.[1] This stock was indigenous to the water-systems of
the Loire, the Seine, and the Rhone, in other words, to the whole of
France north of the Garonne; to the south of which river lay the
Iberians. From Gaul it spread to Great Britain. Its present
representatives are the Bretons of Brittany, the Welsh, the Gaels of
Ireland and Scotland, and the Manxmen of the Isle of Man--
_g._ The Gothic or German--
_h._ The Sarmatian, or Slavono-Lithuanic, containing the Slavonians and
Lithuanians of Russia, Poland, Bohemia, Servia, Carinthia, Lithuania,
with other less important areas, and lastly--
_i._ The classical or Greco-Latin stock of Italy and Greece, completing
the list of the European stocks.
These three are more closely allied to each other than any of the
previous ones. They are also nearer the Keltic; so much so, that a
single class has been made out of the four, a class called
Indo-European. The study, however, of the _value_ of classes is in its
infancy. The real fact that they are allied to an extent to which the
others are not, is important.
Such are the _existing_ groups; but when we consider how small is the
number of the Basques, the only present representatives of the great
Iberian class, and that their preservation to the present time is mainly
due to the accidental circumstances of their occupancy of a stronghold
in the Pyrenees, a new series of facts is suggested. The likelihood of
stocks now extinct having once existed, presents itself; and with it, a
fresh question.
The same suggestion arises when we look at the country occupied by the
intrusive families of the Osmanlis and the Majiars of Rumelia and
Hungary. The populations here are comparatively new-comers; yet it was
no uninhabited tracts that they appropriated. Who was there before them?
Perhaps some members of one of the stocks now existing. Perhaps, a
wholly different family now extinct.
Again--the displacements effected by the different European populations,
one with another, have been enormous. See how the Saxons over-ran
England, the Romans Spain and Gaul. How do we know that some small stock
was not annihilated here? History, it may be said, tells us the
contrary. From history we learn that all the ancient Spaniards were
allied to the ancestors of the Basques, all Gaul to those of the
Bretons, all England to those of the Welsh. Granted. But what does
history tell us about Bavaria, Styria, the Valley of the Po, or Ancient
Thrace? In all these parts the present population is known to be recent,
and the older known next to not at all. The reconstruction of the
original populations of such areas as these is one of the highest
problems in ethnology. To what did they belong, an existing stock more
widely extended than now, or a fresh stock altogether?
My own belief is, that the number of European stocks for which there is
an amount of evidence sufficient to make their extinction a reasonable
doctrine, is two--two and no more; and, even with these, the doctrine of
their extinction is only _reasonable_.
_a._ The old Etruscans are the first of these;
_b._ The Pelasgi the second.
Each will be noticed in its proper place.
I have used the word _extinction_. I must now qualify it; reminding the
reader that this very qualification introduces a new and difficult
subject. Extinction often means no more than the abolition of the
outward and visible signs of ethnological difference. A negro marries a
white. In the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh generation, as the case
may be, his descendant is, to all intents and purposes, a white man. Yet
the negro blood is not extinguished. It exists, though in a small
proportion.
Again--a Cornishman loses his native language and speaks English as his
mother tongue. Many generations before he did this he differed from the
Englishman in speech only. Is his British blood extinguished? No. The
chief sign of it has been lost. That is all.
So that--
Stocks may intermix, and--
Stocks may lose their characteristics.
Now both these phenomena are eminently common in European ethnology; and
this is what we expect from history. Two populations, the Roman and the
German, have more than doubled their original areas. Were all the old
inhabitants, male and female, old and young, in the countries that they
appropriated, put to the sword? We hope and believe the contrary. In
most cases we _know_ they were not. Sometimes there was intermarriage.
This produced intermixture. Sometimes the language, religion, laws, and
habits of the conquerors were adopted by the conquered. This was a loss
of characteristics. So far greater than the influences of all the other
populations of Europe have been those of the Germans and the Romans (to
which, for the eastern part of the continent, we must add the Turks),
that for nearly half Europe, whenever the question will be one of great
intermixture, the basis will be Keltic, Iberic, or Sarmatian as the case
may be, with Romans or Germans for the source of the superadded
elements.
3. The chief problems of the present volume will, for the present, only
be stated; the results being reserved for the conclusion. They are two--
_a._ The extent to which what is commonly called Race is the result of
circumstances, or whether circumstances be the effect of race, _i.e._
whether Race (so called) is a cause or an effect?
_b._ The extent to which differences of what is called race is an
element in national likes and dislikes, predilections or antipathies.
It cannot be denied that each of these is a point of practical as well
as theoretical importance.
* * * * *
The areas with which it is most convenient to begin, are those of the
two isolated stocks, the _Skipetar_ (Albanian), and the
_Iberian_,--Albania and the Spanish peninsula. Of these Albania will be
taken first.
Many writers have considered the Albanian and the Iberic stocks to be
the two oldest in Europe; and there is no want of reasonable grounds for
the doctrine. It is not, however, for this reason that they come first
in the list.
Nor is it because the _Skipetar_ of Albania are the more eastern of the
two that they take precedence of the Iberians; although, in the eyes of
such inquirers as deduce the European populations from Asia, their
position on the frontier of Europe gives good grounds for doing so.
The true reason is practical rather than scientific, arising out of the
line of criticism which will be found necessary for the forthcoming
investigation.
It is so convenient to take Gaul next to the Spanish peninsula, Italy
next to Gaul, and Greece next to Italy, that the necessity for breaking
the continuity of the arrangement when we come to Albania must be
avoided; and this is done by dealing with Albania at the very first, and
getting its ethnology disposed of as a preliminary. It could not be
taken in hand after that of Greece, for reasons which will appear when
we come to that country.
The native name of the Albanians is _Skipetar_, or _Mountaineer_, and
this is of some importance; as will be seen in the sequel. The word
_Albanian_ is, I think, Roman. _Arvanitæ_ is the form found in the
Byzantine writers. This is converted by the Turks into _Arnaout_. It is
unlucky that the word is one which appears elsewhere, _viz._, in
Caucasus, where the ancient name of the modern province of Daghestan is
called _Albania_ in the classical writers. So is Scotland; and so also
part of England; _Albyn_ being the Gaelic name out of which our French
neighbours get their _Albion perfide_, for the purposes of rhetoric and
poetry. It cannot be denied that the occurrence of forms so similar is
strange; and it is against the chances that it should be accidental. The
explanation which suggests itself is as follows. Pliny mentions a
people termed _Albanenses_, as one of the Liburnian tribes; whilst
Ptolemy gives us a town called _Albanopolis_ in the _southern_ part of
Illyricum. Now, as we know that the name is not native, as we seek for
it in vain amongst the early Greek writers, and as the opposite coast of
Italy was occupied by the Cisalpine and Cispadane Gauls, we have reasons
for considering _Albyn_ as applied to Scotland, and _Albyn_ as applied
to the mountainous country on the eastern side of the Adriatic and
Ionian seas, to be one and the same word, referable to one and the same
Keltic group of tongues. Hence, it contains the root _Alp=mountain_, and
translates the native name _Skipetar=mountaineer_, &c.
Like all such coincidences it has done mischief in the way of ethnology.
Though few have derived the Skipetar from Scotland, many have done so
from Caucasus--and that on the strength of the name. Yet it is as little
native in the one locality as the other, since no nation of Daghestan
calls itself _Albanian_, a fact which precludes all arguments in favour
of a real community of origin from the similarity of name _in limine_;
or rather a fact which ought to do so, for the Caucasian origin of the
Skipetar still has its supporters.
Their present area extends from Montenegro to the Gulf of Arta; the
northern frontier being Slavonic, the southern Greek. Eastwards it
reaches the back-bone of Turkey, or the watershed between the small
rivers which empty themselves into the Adriatic, and the larger ones
which fall into the Ægean--a very Switzerland for its ruggedness. Hence,
the Skipetar are a nation of Highlanders, more so than any other
population of Europe, since the Basques of the Pyrenees are
inconsiderable in area, and the Swiss are divided between the Germans,
the French, the Roman, and the Italian families. They lie, too, more to
the south than any other mountaineers, and it is not very fanciful to
imagine that if they were Lowlanders, their skin and hair would approach
that of the Greeks, with some of whom they lie under the same parallel.
If so, their mountain _habitat_ counteracts the effect of their southern
sun, by a species of compensation common in many parts of the world.
The testimony of travellers to their belonging to the fair-complexioned
and grey-eyed populations is pretty general, although Skene gives the
Mirdite tribe a swarthy complexion and black eyes. The evidence, too, as
to their bulk and stature varies; some writers giving them spare, light,
and tall forms, others making them shorter, and more square-built than
the Greek. That the eye has less animation, and the countenance less
vivacity (in other words, that the Albanian is heavy-featured as
compared with his quick-witted neighbours) is certain.
Both the men and women are hardy, and expose their bodies freely to the
atmosphere, accustoming themselves to an out-door life amongst their
flocks and herds, and dwelling, when indoors, in rude huts. Like the
Swiss, they willingly let out their valour and hardihood in military
service; and the best and most unscrupulous soldiers of the sultan are
those recruits, who partly by force, partly by pay, are brought from
Albania. Hence we find Albanians far beyond the pale of Albania; in
Greece, in Thrace, in Asiatic Turkey, in Egypt, and even in Persia. The
tribes, too, amongst themselves indulge in the right of private quarrel,
rarely rising to the dignity of warfare, but more like the old
border-feuds of England and Scotland. With the Slavonians of Montenegro,
different from themselves in blood and political relations, the warfare
is more bitter and serious, and the Albano-Slavonic frontier is the
continual scene of aggression and reprisal and intrigue.
It was only under their famous chieftain, George Castriote, or
Scanderbeg, that the Skipetar played the part of a nation of any
importance in European history, and here their actions were what we
expect beforehand--those of brave mountaineers, to whom war is a habit,
and with whom dependence has always been but nominal. To the
intellectual and moral history of Europe they have contributed nothing.
Their alphabet is the Greek, slightly modified, and their literature
either unwritten, or confined to ecclesiastical subjects.
Creeds sit easy upon them. Before the Ottoman conquest they were
Christians, partly of the Greek, partly of the Roman church. At present
they are divided between the three, the majority being Mahometans.
The Skipetar language has long drawn the attention of philologists; for
it has long been known to be as little like the Greek and Slavonic of
the parts around, as it is to the Turkish. The notion that it was a mere
medley of the three soon disappeared; and when the Albanian became
recognised as a separate substantive language, its remarkable isolation
was a source of great doubt and perplexity. The latest author who has
investigated it, Xylander, considers it to be Indo-European, and in this
Prichard agrees with him. I think, however, that it cannot be placed in
that group without enlarging the extent of the class, _i.e._, without
changing the meaning of the term. _Whatever it may be, it is not
intermediate to the Latin and Greek_, a fact of which the import will be
seen when we come to the ethnology of Greece and Italy.
The Skipetar fall into the following divisions, clans, or tribes.
1. The Gheghides, containing--
_a._ The proper Gheghides, the most northern of the Skipetar,
conterminous with the Slavonic countries of Montenegro, Bosnia, and
Herzegovna, bounded on the south by the river Drin--
_b._ The Mirdites, south of the Drin, in the province of Croia, who like
the Gheghides, are Christians.
The Gheghides, as a class, are dark-skinned and black-eyed.
2. The Toskides of Toskuria, or the country between Croia and the
Vojutza, the least mountainous part of Albania and containing the
valleys of the Sternatza and the Beratina, are more light than dark,
with blue or grey eyes.
3. The Liapides of Liapuria, or the valley and water-shed of the
Deropuli and the parts about Delvinaki, are the worst-looking and most
demoralized of the Skipetar. Such at least is their character.
4. The Dzhami of Dzhamuria are the most agricultural. They extend from
the Liapides on the north, to the Greek frontier southward, Parga and
Suli being two of their towns.
The purity of the Albanian blood is considerable; and I believe that, as
the Skipetar were once spread far wider in every direction than they
are to be found at present,[2] and as their frontier has receded, the
amount of Albanian blood beyond Albania is very great, whereas the
foreign blood within Albania itself is but slight. The dark complexions
of the Gheghides may, or may not, be referable to Slavonic intermixture.
The lighter skins of the Toskides may, or may not, indicate purity. It
is worth remarking, however, that the fair complexion is found in the
parts most removed from the frontier, as well as in the parts where the
intermixture (such as it is) has been the least.
The Taulantii and Parthini are the populations of antiquity, whose
localities coincide with that of the Toskides. The colonies of Epidamnus
and Apollonia suggest the notion of Greek, the Via Egnatia of Roman
intermixture.
The Liapides are in the country of the Orestæ and Atintanes, the Gheghs
in that of the Encheleæ, the Mirdites in that of the Pirustæ. In the
northern part of their area was the colony of Epidaurus, and the
Dalmatian frontier.
Hitherto the opportunities of intermixture have been but slight. With
that part, however, of Albania which coincides with the ancient Epirus,
rather than with Southern Illyria the case is different.
In the time of Pyrrhus it was Hellenized, and at the very earliest dawn
of history its population was modified still more considerably. By whom?
By the inhabitants of the opposite coast of Italy, whoever they were.
This is as much as is necessary to say about the Skipetar of Albania at
present. They are the descendants of the Southern Illyrians and the
ancient Epirots--Chaonians, Thesprotians, Molossians, &c. They are pure
in blood, as compared with nine-tenths of the rest of Europe; but still
more or less mixed, the chief foreign elements being ancient Italian,
Greek, and Roman.
CHAPTER II.
SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.--THE EUSKALDUNAC, OR BASQUES.--THE IBERIAN
STOCK.--THE TURDETANIAN
CIVILIZATION.--PHŒNICIAN--ROMAN--VANDAL--GOTHIC
ELEMENTS.--KELTIBERIANS.--THE ORIGINAL KELTÆ IBERIANS.--THE WORD
KELTIC OF IBERIAN ORIGIN.--THE ARAB CONQUEST.--EXPULSION OF THE
ARABS.--THE JEWS OF SPAIN.--GIPSIES.--PHYSICAL AND MORAL
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MODERN SPANIARDS.--PORTUGAL.
The western extremity of the Pyrenees, where France and Spain join,
gives us a locality rendered famous by the historical events of San
Sebastian, and the legends of Fuenterabia, with the provinces of Bearn
and Gascony on the French, and Navarre and Biscay on the Spanish, side
of the mountains. Here it is where, although the towns, like Bayonne,
Pampeluna, and Bilbao, are French or Spanish, the country people are
_Basques_ or _Biscayans_--Basques or Biscayans not only in the provinces
of _Biscay_, but in Alava, Upper Navarre, and the French districts of
Labourd and Soule. Their name is Spanish (the word having originated in
that of the ancient _Vascones_), and it is _not_ the one by which they
designate themselves; though, possibly, it is indirectly connected with
it. The _native_ name is derived from the root _Eusk_-; which becomes
Eusk-_ara_ when the language, Eusk-_kerria_ when the country, and
Eusk-_aldunac_ when the people are spoken of; so that the Basque
language of the Biscayans of Biscay is, in the vernacular tongue, the
_Euskara_ of the _Euskaldunac_ of _Euskerria_.
It is not for nothing that this difference of form has been indicated.
In the classical writers we find more than one of the old Spanish
populations mentioned under different derivatives from the same root,
and sometimes a doubt is expressed by the writer in whose pages it
occurs, as to whether there were two separate populations, or only one
denoted by two synonymous names. Thus, side by side with the Bast-_uli_,
we find the Bast-_itani_, and, side by side with the Turd-_uli_, the
Turd-_etani_. Now respecting these last, Strabo expressly says that
whether they were different populations under the same name, or the same
under different ones is uncertain.
That the Euskara is no new tongue may be inferred from the fact of its
falling into dialects; which Humboldt limits to three, whilst others
extend them to five or six.
_a._ The Biscayan proper is spoken in the country of the ancient
Autrigones and Caristii, and it has been proposed to call it the
Autrigonian. It has, less correctly, been called _Cantabrian_, and this
is the name which the national taste best likes; for a descent from the
indomitable Cantabrian that so long and so successfully spurned the yoke
of Rome, and who transmitted the same spirit and the same independence
to the Asturian, is creditable enough to be claimed. Nor is the claim
unfounded; since, in all probability, the ancient Cantabria included
some of the ancestors of the Euskaldunac.
_b._ The Guipuscoan is the western Biscayan.
_c._ The Laburtanian is the Euskarian of France, spoken in the parts
about St. Jean de Luz; and which, in the district of Soule, is supposed
to fall into a sub-dialect.
The Euskarian language has always been the standing point to those
inquirers who have argued backwards, from the existing state of things,
towards the reconstruction of the ethnology and philology of antiquity;
first and foremost of whom, both in date and importance, is Wilhelm von
Humboldt, whose essays on the subject form two of the most classical
monographs in comparative philology. The method he employed was much
more of a novelty then than now. We may guess what it was beforehand. It
was the analysis of local names. In this he was successful. Roots like
_ast_-, _ur_-, and others, found in the ancient names of Spanish and
Portuguese localities, far beyond the present pale of the Euskarian
tongue, he referred to the Basque, and found them significant therein;
thus _uria=town_ or _city_, and _ast=rock_ or _mountain_--whereby
_Asturias_ means the _mountainous country_, and _Astures_ the
_mountaineers_.
His inference was (as might be expected) that the Euskarian was as
little a modern and local tongue as the Welsh; indeed, that it was so
far from anything of the kind, as to be one of the oldest in Europe, and
not only old, but widely-spread also. The whole of the peninsula, France
as far as the Garonne and the Rhone, and even portions of Italy, were,
according to Humboldt, originally Basque; or, as it is more conveniently
called, _Iberic_ or _Iberian_, from the ancient name of Spain--_Iberia_.
So that now we talk of the ancient Vascones, Varduli, Autrigones and
Caristii as particular divisions of the great _Iberic_ stock, under
their ancient names, the Euskaldunac being the same under a modern one;
whilst the Basques and Navarrese are Euskaldunac, under French and
Spanish designations.
The present Euskaldunacs must be a population of as pure blood as any in
Europe, lineal descendants from the Autrigones, Varduli, and Vascones,
and closely related to the Asturians. At any rate they are the purest
blood in the Peninsula. This we infer from their language, and the
mountaineer character of their area. They are the Welsh of Spain.
With the pure Euscaldunac let us now contrast the most mixed portion of
the Peninsular population; which is that of the water-system of the
Guadalquiver, and the parts immediately south and east of it--Seville,
Cordova, Jaen, Grenada, and Murcia, if we take the modern provinces; the
country of the Turdetani and Bastitani, if we look to the ancient
populations--Bætica, if we adopt the general name of the Romans,
Andalusia in modern geography.
The mountain-range between Jaen and Murcia, the Sagra Sierra, was
originally the Mons Oros-_peda_, a fact which I notice, because the
element -_peda_, occurs with a mere difference of dialect in the ancient
name of the mountains of Burgos, Idu-_beda_. So that here, if nowhere
else, we have a geographical name common to the northern and southern
parts of the peninsula--an Iberic gloss in two distant localities. It
was the Iberians of these parts who were the first to receive foreign
intermixture, and the last to lose it, the Iberians of the Bætis, or
Guadalquiver, favoured above all other nations of the peninsula in soil,
in climate, and in situation. Strabo expatiates with enthusiasm almost
unbecoming to a geographer, on their wealth, their industry, their
commerce, and their civilization; and all this is no more than their
physical condition prepares us to expect. Cities to the number of two
hundred and upwards, docks, _anachyses_ (or _locks_), lighthouses,
canals, salt works, mines, agriculture, woven articles, fisheries, an
alphabet, and a literature attest the civilization of the ancient
Turdetanians as known to the writers of the reign of Augustus; at which
time, however, the country was so Romanized that the Iberic tongue was
already superseded by the Latin throughout the whole level country;
Cordova and Seville,--the pre-eminently Roman towns of Spain,--having
been founded by picked bodies of Romans and natives. Hence, in respect
to its date, the Spanish of Andalusia is the oldest daughter of the
Latin.
But the Romans were as little the first intruders who introduced foreign
blood and foreign ideas into Southern Spain as they were the last. Their
predecessors were the Phœnicians--sometimes direct from Tyre and
Sidon, oftener from the Tyrian colony of Carthage. It was through the
accounts of the Phœnicians that the earliest notices of Iberia found
their way into Greece; it was through the Phœnicians that the
Hellenic poets first heard of the columns of Hercules. It was through
the Phœnician--Punic or Tyrian, as the case might be--that the mining
and commercial industry of Turdetania was developed. Through them, too,
probably (but not certainly) came the alphabet. I say _probably_,
because the shape of the letters is Greek or Italian rather than
Phœnician. As the Phœnician settlements seem to have been
factories rather than colonies, and as their marriages must have been
with native women, their influence was moral rather than physical,
_i.e._, they introduced new ideas rather than new blood. Their contact
with the Turdetanians may be spread over some seven centuries--from
about 900 to 200 B.C.
New ideas, too, rather than new blood was what was introduced by the
Romans; the great change which they effected being that of the language
from Iberic to Latin. At the same time, it is by no means safe to say
that the Turdetanian civilization was wholly of foreign origin--half
Roman and half Phœnician. The inland cities could scarcely be the
latter. Yet they existed when Rome first began its conquests. So high do
I put either the actual civilization of the southern Iberians, or (what
is nearly the same thing) the capacity for receiving its elements, that
I doubt whether it stands on a lower level than that of Northern Italy
itself _minus_ its geographical advantages of contiguity to Greece.
Their remote position was a great disadvantage, and so was the
comparative smallness of their sea-board, arising from the unindented
character of the peninsular coast.
Between the garrisons of Rome and Carthage we may safely assume some
intermixture of native African blood--Numidian, Gætulian, or
Mauritanian--Amazirgh, Kabail, or Berber. It is safe, too, not exactly
to exclude Greek influences from Turdetanian Iberia altogether, but to
hold as a general rule that, from the monopolizing character of the
Phœnician commerce--especially the Carthaginian branch of it--the
Greek and Phœnician influences were in the inverse ratio to each
other.
The chief _negative_ fact connected with ancient Bætica is, that none of
its geographical localities end in -_briga_, a remark, of which we shall
soon see the import.
The Roman power in Spain was broken by those populations, who gave to
Spain the important foreign elements of the fifth century. These are
said to be the Alans, the Vandals, the Suevi, and the Goths. Concerning
the first of these there is a doubt. The true Alani were a people from
the parts between the rivers Volga and Jaik to the north, and the range
of Caucasus to the south--people whose nearest neighbours were the
Circassians and Russians, or, at any rate, their ancient equivalents:
people whose affinities were Asiatic; and whose nearest kinsmen were the
Huns, the Avars, the Khazars, and the Turks. Now I do not say that the
presence of such a population in Spain, in the first ten years of the
fifth century (about A.D. 408) is impossible; perhaps, indeed, it is
probable. The Huns, with whom the Alans were allied, were then hanging,
like a cloud charged with thunder, over Europe, about to carry carnage
and desolation as far westward as the plains of Champagne. And the Alans
will help them. So I do not deny that they may have invaded Spain. I
remark, however,--as good authorities have done before me--that, except
in Spain, the Suevi are almost always in alliance with the _Alemanni_; a
nation with a name so like that of the _Alani_, as for confusion to be
likely. Such confusion, I think, existed here: in other words, I believe
that the invaders of Spain were the Suevi and _Alemanni_--not the Suevi
and _Alani_. If the view be wrong, we must admit an
intermixture--inconsiderable, perhaps, in amount--of _Turk_ blood.
The Vandals--for reasons given elsewhere--I believe to have been no
Germans at all, but Slavonians under a German leader, the ancestors of
the present Serbs of Silesia and Lusatia: since the express statement of
Idatius is that they were _Vandali Silingi_. Now the _Silingi_ can
easily be shown to have been the old Silesians. The existence of
Slavonic blood in Spain was first indicated by the present writer; and
as _Andal_-usia took its name from the Vandals in question, the local
ethnologist may be well employed in seeking for Slavonic elements in a
quarter where they have not hitherto been suspected. As the Vandals,
too, of Andalusia were the Vandals of Genseric, Gelimir, and the kings
of northern Africa, it must be Slavonic rather than German blood, which
is not unreasonably supposed to exist amongst some of the mountaineers
of Algeria. Whether the Vandals occupied Andalusia to the comparative
exclusion of the Goths is uncertain.
The Suevi of Spain must have been but little different from those
Burgundian Germans who conquered Germany. They formed part of the same
confederacy, and only differed from their allies in proceeding further
southwards.
The Goths belonged to a different branch. Their epoch is from A.D. 412
to A.D. 711. As the Gothic empire was an extension from that of southern
Gaul, Catalonia may be the province where the Gothic blood is most
abundant. Niebuhr considers that they pressed the Suevi before them into
Portugal and Asturias.
Two other elements require notice, both early, but one insignificant in
amount, and the other obscure and problematical; the Greek and the
Keltic.
From Marseilles, _Greek_ colonists founded Emporia on the coast of
Catalonia, and a few other places of less importance.
But who were the _Keltæ_ of Spain? the population whose name occurs in
the word _Celtici_ and _Celtiberi_, _Keltic Iberians_, or _Iberian
Kelts_? Three considerations come in here.
_a._ First, the external evidence, or the testimony of ancient authors
as to the presence of Kelts in Spain and Portugal.
_b._ Secondly, the internal evidence derived from the remains of
language, the presence of certain customs, and physical appearance.
_c._ The _à priori_ likelihood or unlikelihood of a _Kelt-iberic_
mixture.
The last is considerable.
The evidence that gives us Kelts at all in the Peninsula gives us them
for three-fourths of its area; indeed, Andalusia is the only part
wherein reasons of some sort or other for their presence, cannot be
discovered. We find traces of them in the valleys of the Ebro, the
Guadiana, the Tagus, and the Douro, and we find them also on the high
central table-lands that form the water-shed. Such being the case, what
must be our view of their chronological relations to the Iberi? Are they
the older occupants of Spain and Portugal, or the newer? If the newer,
the displacement must have been enormous. If the older, whence are we
to bring the Iberians? So great are the difficulties of this
alternative, that the fact itself requires extraordinary caution before
we admit it at all. Let us deal with the evidence in this cautious
spirit.
The external evidence is clear and decisive. To go no further than
Strabo, we have Kelts in the north, Kelts between the Guadiana and the
Douro, and Kelts in the interior.
At the head-waters of the Guadiana, Posidonius places the Keltiberians,
in which parts they “increased in numbers, and made the whole of the
neighbouring country _Keltiberic_.” This is the country on each side of
the Sierra de Toledo, or New Castile, the very centre of Spain, and, as
such, an unlikely place for an immigrant population, whether we look to
its distance from the frontier, or to its mountainous aspect. They are
carried, at least, as far north as the mountains of Burgos, and to the
upper waters of the Douro on one side, and the Ebro on the other. So
that Old Castile, with parts of Leon and Aragon, may be considered as
Keltiberic. This is the first division.
In the south of Portugal comes the second, _i.e._, in Alemtejo, or the
parts between the Tagus and the Guadiana. Here are the _Celtici_ of the
classical writers.
The third section is found in the _north_ of Portugal, and in the
neighbourhood of Cape Finisterre. Here Strabo places the Artabri, and
close to them _Celtici_ and _Turduli_ of the same nation with those of
the south, _i.e._, those of Alemtejo. His language evidently suggests
the idea of a migration. Such is the Keltic area as determined by
external evidence, and it cannot be denied that it is very remarkable.
It is of considerable magnitude, but very discontinuous and unconnected.
The internal evidence is wholly of one sort, _viz._, that which we
collect from the names of geographical localities. One of the common
terminations in the map of ancient Gaul is the word -_briga_ (as in
Eburo-_briga_), which takes the slightly different forms of -_briva_,
and -_brica_--Baudo-_brica_, Samaro-_briva_. Now compounds of -_briga_
are exceedingly common in Spain. They occur in all the parts to which
_Celtici_ or _Celtiberi_ are referred, _and in a great many more
besides_. Hence the internal evidence--as far, at least, as the
compounds in -_briga_ are concerned--gives us a larger Keltic area (or
more Keltiberians) than the testimony of authors; indeed it gives us the
whole of the peninsula except Andalusia, a fact which explains the
import of a previous remark as to absence of compounds ending in -_briga_
south of the Sierra Morena. It is rare, too, in Catalonia--perhaps
non-existent.
Tested, however, by the presence of the form in question, Valentia on
the west, and all Portugal (the ancient Lusitania) on the east, were
Keltiberic--as may be seen by reference to any map of ancient Spain.
But there are serious objections to the usual inference from this
compound. It is nearly the only geographical term of which the form is
Keltic. And this is a remarkable instance of isolation. The
terminations -_durum_, -_magus_, and -_dunum_, all of which are far
commoner in Gaul than even -_briga_ itself, are nowhere to be found.
Neither are the Gallic prefixes, such as _tre_-, _nant_-, _ver_-, &c.
Hence, it is strange that, if Spain were Keltic, only one Keltic form
should have come down to us. Where are the rest? I am inclined to
believe that the inference as to such a Spanish name as, _e.g._,
Talo-_briga_, being Keltic, on the strength of such undoubted Gallic
words as Eboro-_briga_, is no better than the assertion that the Jewish
name Samp-_son_ was in the same category with the English names
John-_son_ and Thomp-_son_ would be. Such accidental resemblances are by
no means uncommon. The termination -_dun_ is as common in Keltic, as the
termination -_tun_ is in German. Yet they are wholly independent
formations. At the same time I cannot deny that the internal and
external evidence partially support each other.
But there is another series of facts which goes further still to
invalidate the belief in the existence of Kelts in Spain. It is this.
_Instead of the Kelts of Iberia having been Kelts in the modern sense of
the term, the Kelts of Gallia were Iberians._ This is an unfortunate
circumstance. Writers, speakers, journalists, and orators, Ribbonmen and
Orangemen, who neither know nor care much about the Natural History of
Man, talk about the _Keltic_ stock, or the _Keltic_ race, with a
boldness and fluency that, except in the case of the antagonist term
_Anglo-Saxon_, we meet with nowhere else. To read some of the
dissertations on Irish misgovernment, or Welsh dissent, one might fancy
that an American of Pennsylvania was writing about the aboriginal
Indians, or the enslaved negroes--so much is there made of race, and so
familiar are even the non-ethnological part of the world with the term.
Men know this when they know nothing else.
Great, then, is the actual and practical currency and general
recognition of the word; so great that its historical truth, and its
theoretical propriety are matters of indifference. Be it ever so
incorrect, the time for changing it has gone by. Nevertheless, I think
(nay, I am sure) that the word is misapplied.
I think, that though used to denominate the tribe and nations allied to
the Gauls, it was, originally, no Gallic word--as little native as
_Welsh_ is British.
I also think that even the first populations to which it was applied
were other than _Keltic_ in the modern sense of the term.
I think, in short, that it was a word belonging to the Iberian language,
applied, until the time of Cæsar at least, to Iberic populations.
The name came from the Greeks of the Gulf of Lyons--the Greeks of
Massilia, or of Emporia, more probably the former. Now, as there is
express evidence that a little to the west of Marseilles the Ligurian
and Iberian areas met, the likelihood of the word belonging to the
latter language is considerable.
It is increased by the circumstance of two-thirds, if not more, of the
Keltic portion of Gaul being Iberian. Posidonius places the centre of
the Keltic country in Provence, near the spot where the Roman settlement
of Narbo was built: an Iberian locality. The Kelts of Herodotus are in
the neighbourhood of the _city_ called _Pyrene_; a word which carries us
as far westward as the Pyrenees, although its meaning is different. As
far as they extended beyond the present provinces of Roussillon and
Languedoc, they extended _westwards_; beyond--according to
Herodotus--the Pillars of Hercules, and as far as the frontier of the
extreme Kynetæ. Aristotle knew the true meaning of the word Pyrene,
_i.e._, that it denoted a range of mountains; and he also called Pyrene
“a mountain of Keltica.” By the time of Cæsar, however, a great number
of undoubted Gauls were included under the name _Celtæ_: in other words,
the Iberian name for an Iberian population was first adopted by the
Greeks as the name for _all_ the inhabitants of south-western Gaul, and
it was then extended by the Romans so as to include all the populations
of Gallia except the Belgæ and Aquitanians. The word _Celtæ_ also passed
for a native name--“_ipsorum_ lingua _Celtæ, nostra Galli_ appellantur.”
Upon this Prichard reasonably remarks, that Cæsar would have written
more accurately had he stated that the people whom the Greeks called
Κἑλται were _Galli_ in the eyes of a _Roman_.
But the Greek form for _Galli_ is Γἁλ-αται, a form suspiciously like
Κἑλτ-αι. I admit that this engenders a difficulty, since it shows the
possibility of the two words being the same. At the same time it can
be explained. The ατ in Γἁλ-αται is non-radical. It is the sign of the
plural number, as it is in Irish at the present moment; whereas the τ in
Κελτ-αι is a part of the root.
And now I have given the additional reason for believing that the
so-called Kelts of Spain were no Kelts at all in the modern sense of
the word, but only Iberians; and I further suggest the likelihood of the
word meaning _mountaineer_, or something like it, in which case the
Kelts of South Gaul must be supposed to be (as they are made by
Herodotus and Aristotle) the Pyrenean Iberians, the Celtiberi and
Celtici being also the Highlanders of the great central range of Spain,
of Gallicia, and of Alemtejo. This, however, is only a suggestion.
Perhaps the point is not very important. Whether we look to the amount
of their civilization, to their national temper as shown in the defence
of their independence, or to the extent to which they contributed to the
literature of the Latin language, there are no very striking differences
between the Gaul and the Iberian. Personal heroes like Viriathus and
Vercingetorix occur on both sides; whilst Gaul resisted Cæsar by
instances of endurance behind stone walls scarcely inferior to the
display of obstinate valour at Numantia.
The Gothic conquest of Spain was succeeded, in the eighth century, by
one of equal, perhaps, greater, importance. The line it took was from
south to north; so that its direction was different from that of the
Goths. It was also made by a southern population. The Arabs who effected
the first invasion under Musa, were the Arabs of an army; _i.e._,
almost wholly males; probably, too, they were pretty pure in blood.
Afterwards, however, larger swarms came over from Africa; and it cannot
be doubted that, along with these there were females and families of
mixed African as well as of pure Arab descent. The areas which were
successively appropriated by these invaders are not exactly those that
we expect, _à priori_. Murcia, or the March, was less modified by the
conquest than Valencia and other countries northwards. It was held in a
sort of imperfect independence by Theodemir, and under the name of
_Tadmor_, into which that of the Gothic king was metamorphosed by the
Arabs, long continued to be the most Gothic part of south-eastern Spain.
In contrast to Grenada, and in consonance with what we expect from their
geographical position, were the northern provinces of Asturias, Biscay,
Navarre, and Galicia--Galicia, in respect to its ethnology, belonging
almost as much to Portugal as to Spain. Into Asturias the arms of the
Arab conqueror never penetrated: so that the original nationality was
preserved in the kingdom of Oviedo, under the successors of Pelagius or
Pelayo. Were these brave and independent mountaineers Goths or Romans?
or were they original Iberians? And if of mixed blood, in what
proportion were the different elements? They seem to have been second
in purity of blood to the true and Proper Basques only. They were
somewhat more Romanized than the latter, as is shown by their language;
but both were equally free of Gothic admixture. This view rests partly
on the previous details of their history, and partly on the names of the
kings who succeeded Pelayo. They are not Gothic, like Euric, Wallia, or
Roderic, nor yet Latin, like Pedro; but truly and properly Spanish (with
the exception, perhaps, of Frivila), as Alonzo, Ordonio, Sancho, &c.;
Spanish in the same way that Edward and Richard are German, or Arthur
and Owen, Keltic. Pacheco, perhaps, is the truest Iberian designation.
It occurs in Cæsar, as Paciecus. When the Arabs conquered Spain, their
peculiar civilization was but partially developed. It grew up, to a
great degree, within Spain itself.
The Arab elements belonged to the same class with the Phœnician,
though to a different section of it. So did the Jewish, which were
introduced earlier, and, if not of equal amount, were, at least, of
longer duration. The Jews brought with them the oldest civilization in
the world. But they were important physical influences as well. They
came with their families, and, consequently, were less thrown upon the
necessities of intermixture than the majority of the Arabs. The
intermixture, however, was in both cases considerable. As long as the
Arian kings of the Gothic stock held their sway, the Israelite was
tolerated and something more. His industry was protected, and his
earlier familiarity with letters and the civilizing influences of
commerce respected. The prejudices against intermixture were chiefly on
his side. Orthodoxy, however, introduced persecution. Some of its
earliest enactments forbid Christian wives and Christian mistresses to
Jews, a sure proof of the previous prevalence of an opposite custom. In
the Mahometan parts of the Peninsula, the toleration was considerable
throughout. Lastly must be noticed the great extent to which the pride
in his real or supposed purity of blood characterizes the Hidalgo. This
would not have been the case if purity of blood were the rule, and an
Arab or Jewish cross the exception. The reign of Ferdinand and Isabella
was signalized by the double ejection of the Jews from the Peninsula in
general, and the Arabs from their last possession, the kingdom of
Grenada. Such ejectments are never complete. Each, however, of these was
one of remarkable magnitude.
The Normans, who settled on so many of the coasts of southern Europe,
made a smaller impression on the Iberian peninsula than elsewhere. Still
they must be recognised as an element.
Such is the basis of the Spanish stock, and such the chief superadded
elements--Iberic in the first instance: then Phœnician, Greek, Roman,
Gothic, Vandal, Alan (?), Jewish, Arab, and Norman, to say nothing about
the cases of French and other settlers from the modern kingdoms of
Europe. These elements are differently distributed over the several
provinces; and at the present moment each has some peculiar
characteristics.
The most regular features, and the most purely brunette complexions are
found in Andalusia, conjoined with a gay, pleasure-loving disposition;
not given to the sterner virtues, but with considerable intellectual
capacity, as shown both in art and literature; and, in Andalusia, the
foreign elements are at their _maximum_--chiefly oriental, but partly
(in the belief, at least, of the present writer) Slavonic. Yet it is not
safe to refer the one to the other. The soil and climate of
Andalusia--the favoured valley of the most southern river in Spain--have
also their peculiarities.
In Grenada the habits are ruder, and Grenada is chiefly a mountain
range.
Murcia[3] has the credit of being the Bœotia of Spain. It has less
than its share of Arab, and, perhaps, a considerable amount of Gothic,
blood.
Valencia has been unfavourably described; the physiognomy of its
population being the most Moorish in Spain, and the temper dangerous. It
was from Valencia that the last branch of Arabs was expelled in the
reign of Philip III.--the Little Moors or Moriscoes. Orientals as they
were, the nobles to whom they were serfs, and whose land they
cultivated, could ill afford to lose them. Contrary to what we expect
from their stock, they were signalized by steady industry and
perseverance in agriculture. The present language of Valencia is only
Spanish so far as it is spoken in the Spanish peninsula. It is a
distinct tongue from the _Castilian_; yet not French. It belongs to the
Provençal class--called also Limousin.
It is the same with Catalonia; the least Iberic, the least Arab, but,
perhaps, the most Roman, and the most Gothic of all the Spanish
provinces--_Cat-alonia_ or _Goth-land_--commercial, manufacturing, and
radical, with a political history of its own, and, for a time, an
independent line of sovereigns--the Berengarii.
In respect to language, the standard Spanish is that of the Castiles;
and it is upon the Castilians that our usual notions of a Spaniard are
founded. Decorous, reserved, and unenterprising, the occupant of a
misplaced metropolis, and of an arid table-land, which, for the most
part, is too much a mountain for agricultural, and too little of one for
mining industry, he is a type of the third variety of the Iberic
stock--the Andalusian and Catalonian being the other two.
In the fourth, the mountaineer-character, with its usual spirit of
independence, rude manners, and hardy mode of life, which attains its
height in Navarre and Biscay, is shared in different degrees by the
Galicians, Asturians, northern Arragonese, and the Spaniards of Leon;
the physical appearance changing from dark to light, and from a regular
contour to coarse angular features, with high cheek-bones. In Galicia, a
province of hewers of wood and drawers of water, this is most
remarkable. In Biscay, the comparative lightness of complexion has
engendered the idea of a Norman intermixture.
Though it would be a dangerous overstatement to say that descent,
pedigree, blood, or extraction go for nothing, we cannot consider the
nature of the Spanish national character in general, as exhibited in the
development of its science, art, literature, social institutions, and in
its moral and material influence upon the history of the world, without
seeing that many of the leading features of the drama that the Spaniards
have played upon the theatre of both the Old and New World are
referable to the effect of external circumstances--circumstances which,
in our inability to work out the details of cause and effect, we must be
content to call accidental. Who so likely to be isolated in the
character of their literature, and deficient in comprehensiveness of
thought, as the nation with the smallest sea-board and the most extreme
geographical position in Europe? Who so probable to have spread their
language over half America as the same? Who so fit to be good Catholics
as the favoured of the Pope, the authorized converters of the heathen
Indians, and the people whose national life was a crusade against the
Mahometan on their own soil? Who, too, so born to the pride of purity of
blood? There is much to account for all this, with which descent has
nothing to do, although, perhaps, there is more than the explanation of
all this accounts for.
A ballad literature, rising to the level of the humbler epics, and a
truly home-grown drama, are the self-evolved, indigenous elements of
Spanish literature. Their material influences are to be found in the
histories of America, the Indies, the Philippines, Micronesia, Italy,
and the Mediterranean Islands.
Portugal is Spain with a difference. More purely Iberic, and less
Phœnician, from the first, it was also less Roman, less Arab, and
very slightly Gothic. In Africa and India its influence has been
greater, in America somewhat less than that of Spain. The extent to
which the physical and moral characteristics of the Galicians and
Estremadurans are intermediate and transitional, I am unable to state.
* * * * *
A refinement upon the doctrine of the Keltæ having been Iberian, and of
the Celtiberi having been no Kelts at all, in the usual sense of the
term, will be found when we come to the ethnology of Ireland. It
consists in the possibility of one or both having been _Gaels_--Kelts,
it is true, but not Kelts in the sense given to the word by the
ancients.
CHAPTER III.
FRANCE.--IBERIAN BLOOD IN GAUL AS WELL AS THE SPANISH
PENINSULA.--IBERIANS OF GASCONY, ETC.--LIGURIANS.--HOW FAR
KELTIC.--BODENCUS.--INTERMIXTURE.--ROMAN, GERMAN,
ARAB.--ALSATIA.--LORRAINE.--FRANCHE-COMTÉ.--BURGUNDY, SOUTHERN,
WESTERN, AND NORTHERN FRANCE.--CHARACTER OF THE KELTS.--THE
ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE.--BELGIUM.--ITS ELEMENTS.--KELTIC, GERMAN, AND
ROMAN.--SWITZERLAND.--HELVETIA.--ROMANCE, FRENCH, AND GERMAN
LANGUAGES.
It is convenient to take the ethnology of France next in order to that
of Spain, because we have already seen that, when we examine the
earliest populations of the two countries we shall find that the
_Iberic_ stock was common to the two. Although I find no Gauls in
Iberia, the Iberians in ancient Gaul were numerous; indeed, they occur
in Gascony and Bearn at the present moment.
The predominant stock, however, of Gallia, as is well-known, is the
_Keltic_, still existing, along with its ancient language, and other
characteristics in Brittany.
The Iberians belonged chiefly, though not wholly and exclusively, to
_Aquitania_. In the reign of Augustus this term denoted a _political_,
in that of Julius Cæsar, an _ethnological_ area. The _province_ reached
from the Pyrenees to the Loire; the _Aquitania_ of the true _Aquitani_
from the Pyrenees to the Garonne.
In the present towns of Bazas, Eauze, and Auch, we have the names of the
ancient Vas-_ates_, Elus-_ates_, and Ausci; besides which, the
Soci-_ates_, the Tarus-_ates_, the Garumni, the Bigerriones, the
Preciani, the Gari-_tes_, the Sabuz-_ates_, the Cocos-_ates_, the
Lector-_ates_, and the Tarbelli occupied the present provinces of
Gascony and Bearn in general. It is usual to say that these names are
Iberian. This is scarcely the case. The remarkable peculiarity of them
is as follows: the termination -_at_ is Gallic, and probably the sign of
the plural number, whilst the radical part is not _evidently_ Gallic,
and, probably, not Gallic at all; or (changing the expression) whilst
the Gallic _inflexion_ is common amongst the old names of Gascony, the
Gallic _roots_ (-_magus_, _tre_-, _con_-, &c.) are rare; from which I
infer that the geographical nomenclature of south-western France was
Iberic in respect to its roots, but Gallic in respect to its form; so
that the words in question are Iberic names taken from Gallic
informants. Nothing, however, of great importance depends on this.
In the parts about Baignerres there was a Roman colony, that of the
Convenæ; partly Gallic, partly Iberic, and partly Legionary.[4]
As were Gascony and Bearn, so were Rousillon and the greater part of
Languedoc--Iberic; for the Iberi extended to the Rhone.
Along the frontier of the Iberian area there was certainly intermixture
between the Aquitanians and the true Gauls, and there were also Gallic
settlements, such as Hebro-_magus_, within the Iberian area itself.
Nevertheless, Southern Gaul was Northern Spain, and Northern Spain
Southern Gaul.
Provence and Dauphiné differ from Gascony and Languedoc in having had a
_Ligurian_ rather than an Iberian substratum; in having received Roman
influences earlier and more largely, in having been the area of the
Phocæan colony of Massilia, or Marseilles, in and around which city
there must have been a notable tincture of Greek blood.
Who were the Ligurians?
The Phocæan Greeks founded the colony of Marseilles; and it was not long
before the parts along the coast, and to some distance inland, became
imperfectly known. When Prometheus gives to Hercules the details of his
travels westwards, he says that, “You” (Hercules) “shall reach the
fearless people of the Ligyes, where, with all your bravery, you shall
find no fault with their warlike vigour. It is ordained that you shall
leave your arrows behind. But as all the country is soft, you shall be
unable to find a stone. Then Zeus shall see you in distress, and pity
you, and overshadow the land with a cloud, whence a storm of round
stones shall rain down. With these you shall easily smite and pursue the
army of the Ligyes.” Such is the gist of a quotation from a writer so
early as Æschylus, in his drama of the “Prometheus Unbound,” as given by
Strabo.
These Ligyes are the Ligurians, better known as a people of Italy, and
as the coastmen of the Gulf of Genoa. Southwards and eastwards they
extended as far as the Arno, and westwards to the Rhone; where (as
already stated) they came in contact with the Iberians. So that the
ancient Ligurians were a population common to both Gaul and Italy, just
as the Iberians were common to Gaul and Spain. Herodotus places
Marseilles in the country of the Ligyes.
The fact of this tract being known so much earlier than the interior of
Gaul, known too to the Greeks who first, and more than others, used the
term _Kelt_, confirms the view of its _non_-Gallic origin. At any rate,
it makes it either Iberian or Ligurian, and, consequently, only so far
_Keltic_ (in the modern sense of the term) as the Ligurians were
_Keltæ_.
This is the point now under notice. I think that the Ligurians _were_
Kelts.
In the first place, the name seems to have a meaning in the Keltic
tongue; since Prichard suggests that it may have been derived from
_Llygwyr_,[5] which means in Welsh _coastman_.
In my mind it is a _native_ name also; a point upon which Prichard
expresses a doubt, since he writes that, “it does not prove that the
people were Kelts, since the designation is one more likely to have been
bestowed upon them by a neighbouring tribe than assumed by themselves.”
Who, however, could have bestowed it? Scarcely any population of the
interior, since it is _Greeks_ from whom we get it, and the _coast_ was
the part with which they were chiefly acquainted. Had the name been a
late one, and derived from Roman sources, Dr. Prichard’s inference would
have been legitimate. As it is, however, we have nothing but Ligurians
and Iberians from the Pyrenees to the Arno, and as it cannot be both
Iberic and Keltic (_in the modern sense of the word_), it must, if
Keltic, be Ligurian.
Against it lies the evidence of Strabo, who separates the Ligyes from
the Kelts as a distinct race; differing, however, but _little from the
Kelts in their mode of life_. Now with this qualification, and with the
belief that the Kelts whom he contrasted with the Ligyes were, to a
great extent, Iberian, I lay but little stress on the evidence of
Strabo.
Against it, also, in the eyes of more than one good writer, is a very
questionable etymology; which I will give in full, as a lesson of
caution. Pliny says that the river Po in the Ligurian language was
called _Bodencus_, or _bottomless_. Prichard suggests, in a note, that
the true reading may have been _Boden_-los, and asks whether anybody
will venture hence to conjecture that the Ligurians were Germans? Sir
Francis Palgrave, taking Prichard’s suggestion as a _bonâ fide_ reading,
does this; and that with a great degree of confidence. Yet the
termination -_nc_ is found in the country of the Allobroges, or Dauphiné,
_e.g._, Lem-_incum_, Durot-_incum_, Vap-_incum_, and is also Gallic,
_e.g._, Aged-_incum_. It is British as well--Habita-_ncum_.
The reasons, then, _against_ the Keltic origin of the Ligurians are thus
exceptionable. Yet those in favour of it are weak. One thing, however,
they must have been: _a._ Kelts; _b._ Iberians; or _c._ members of a
wholly new, and now extinct, stock. I incline to the first of these
views rather than the second, and the second rather than the third. At
the same time, they were a well-marked variety; otherwise the Romans
would not so invariably have separated them from the Gauls of both Gaul
and Italy.
The primary population, then, of Gaul (supposing the Ligurians to have
been Keltic) was of a twofold character:--
1. Iberic, in Aquitania, and
2. Keltic (in the modern sense of the term) elsewhere--the Keltic
falling into three divisions:--
α. The Belgic--
β. The proper Gallic--
γ. The Ligurian (?).
The history of the displacement and intermixture is complex. Along the
Ibero-Gallic frontier, or in the parts north of the Garonne, and west of
the Rhone, there must have been small and partial quarrels, sufficient
to create intermixture, and a gradual change of the boundaries from the
earliest times. Perhaps, too, it may be added that the Gauls encroached
on the Iberians rather than the Iberians on the Gauls.
Along the valley of the Rhine, or the Germano-Gallic frontier, there was
the same mutual encroachment, but to a far greater degree, and the wars,
of which the conquest of Ariovistus is a sample, introduced German,
and, perhaps Slavonic blood into Gaul in more quarters than one.
At present--
_Alsatia_ contains the least amount of Keltic blood of all the provinces
of France, inasmuch as it is German in language, and French in respect
to its political relations only. The fifth century is the date of its
conquest, and it was by Germans of the High German division from Suabia
and Franconia that it was reduced. Before this it was Romanized. What
was it before its reduction by Rome? Many at once answer “German,”
because its occupants were the _Triboci_, whom Tacitus calls “_haud
dubie Germani_.” For reasons given elsewhere,[6] I believe that they
were Germanized Gauls rather than true Germans.
_Lorraine_, originally Keltic, and afterwards Romano-Keltic, is less
German than Alsatia, but more so than Champagne. Its name,
_Hlothringen_, is German. I cannot, however, say whether the German
blood in Lorraine was introduced from the north or from the south; by
the High Germans of Alsatia and Franche-Comté, or the Low-Germans of
Clovis.
In _Franche-Comté_ the particular descent is from the Sequani, the tribe
which, of all others equally far from the German frontier, was most
Germanized. For when Cæsar was in Gaul, the Sequani called in the Suevi
and Marcomanni of Ariovistus, and gave up one-third of their land as the
price of his tyrannical protection. Now the army of Ariovistus was
mixed, and there is reason for believing that even Slavonians were to be
found in it. At any rate it infused German blood into the Sequani more
than into their neighbours. The process, however, of Romanizing went on
all the same, until the fifth century, when the invasion that gave their
names to the present province and to Burgundy took place. From which
time forwards the ethnology of _Franche_-Comté, or the country of the
_Franks_, is that of--
_Burgundy._--Here the Kelts were the Sequani, and the Germans, certain
High-Germans of Franconia. Sir James Stephen, in his valuable “Lectures
on the History of France,” draws a broad distinction between the German
blood introduced by the Burgundians, and the German blood introduced by
the Franks of Clovis; exaggerating, however, in my mind, the rudeness of
the latter, as well as the cultivation of the former. Speaking of the
Germany of Tacitus, he says, that it better suited the author to
“pourtray the more striking characteristics of the Teutonic tribes
collectively, than to investigate the more minute peculiarities which
distinguished them from each other. Yet we cannot doubt that, even in
his day, they were far more widely discriminated in fact, than in his
delineation of them, as, beyond all controversy, they were so in the age
of Clovis.
“Thus, for example, the Burgundians, before their irruption to Gaul,
were remarkable for their skill as artizans; and in the poems in which,
not long after that event, they were described by Sidonius Apollinaris,
we have the best attestation of their resemblance to the kind and
simple-hearted German of our own days. Thus also the Gothic people,
almost immediately after their settlement in Aquitaine, manifested a
singular aptitude for a yet higher civilization. For, if St. Jerome was
correctly informed, Ataulph their king seriously projected the
substitution of a new Gothic for the old Roman empire; a scheme in which
the character of Julius was to be ascribed to Alaric, that of Augustus
being reserved for the projector himself. Euric, the successor of
Ataulph, filled his court at Toulouse with rhetoricians, poets, and
grammarians; and coveted (and not altogether in vain) the applause of
the Italian critics for the pure Latinity of his despatches.
“The Franks, on the other hand, were a barbarous people, and their
history is in fact a barbaric history. At their entrance into Gaul they
were worshippers of Odin, and believed that the gates of the Walhalla
rolled back spontaneously on their hinges to admit the warrior who had
dyed, with the blood of his enemies, the battle-field on which he had
himself fallen. From their settlements on the lower Rhine they had
sometimes marched to the defence of the Romano-Gallic province, but more
frequently and gladly to the invasion of it. Their appetite for rapine
was insatiate, unrestrained, and irresistible. In war they were the
prototypes of the Norman pirates of a later age, or of the West Indian
buccaneers of more modern times. In peace they were the very counterpart
of the North American Indians, as depicted by the early travellers in
Canada; a comparison which almost every commentator on Tacitus has
instituted and verified.”
Now I have great doubts about the superior civilization of the
conquerors of Burgundy, Alsatia, and Franche-Comté; but these arise from
a view, perhaps, peculiar to myself, of the nature of the Frank
confederacies. I believe the word Frank to have distinguished the
Germans who were independent of Rome from those who were in allegiance
to the empire, and, consequently, that it might be borne by different
divisions of the German stock, and by wholly unconnected alliances. More
than this--if it separated the Romanized from the independent Germans,
it separated, to a certain extent, the rude from the refined, the Pagan
from the Christian. Now, of these two classes, the rude independent
Pagans were the more likely conquerors of Burgundy and Franche-Comté; in
which case the differences of their civilization is likely to have been
inconsiderable. It is true that they may have been Christianized by
time--but so were the Salians of Clovis. On the other hand, their
contact with the undoubtedly Christian Goths of Dauphiné and Languedoc,
had a truly civilizing tendency.
It was the Franks of Franche-Comté, and not the Salians of Clovis,
amongst whom we find the dynasty of the Merovings: Ptolemy, at least,
places the Μαροὑιγγοι in the country of the Burgundians,
anterior to their passage of the Rhine and their conquest of the Gallic
provinces beyond it. Hence, the true _Meroving_ was the Burgundian
princess Chlotilda, the wife of Clovis, rather than Clovis himself.
In _Savoy_ the foreign intermixture has been but small; the population
being, in the more mountainous parts at least, simply Romano-Keltic--and
then more Keltic than Roman.
Dauphiné, Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony carry us to the Ligurian and
Iberian areas.
Between the second and third Punic wars the Ligyes of Gaul were reduced,
rather later than the Ligurians of Italy. They seem from the first to
have been a warlike nation. Æschylus, as has been seen, arms them
against Hercules; and their brothers in the Apennines defended
themselves with valour and obstinacy. The Salyes were their chief tribe.
How far they extended inwards is uncertain. It is only safe to say that
Provence was Ligurian, and Dauphiné Gallo-Ligurian before it became
Romanized: and that the remainder of the ethnological history of the
Ligurians of Gaul is nearly the same as that of the Gallic Iberians.
Next to the Spanish peninsula, the southern provinces of France were the
most deeply tinctured with _Arab_ influences of any part of Europe.
In the parts between the Loire and Garonne, Poitou, Santonge, Limoges,
and Perigord, exhibit, in a modern form, the names of the ancient
Pictones, Santones, Lemovici, and Petrocorii, all of which were Gallic,
though, perhaps, not so typically Gallic as the Parisii, Carnutes,
Turones, and Bituriges of the Isle of France, the Orleannois, Touraine,
and Berri. In these parts the admixture of Roman and Keltic blood, has
been less disturbed by subsequent admixture of Arabs and Goths than
elsewhere; not that even here it is pure. The Franks of the Netherlands,
Lorraine, and the Franks of Burgundy and Franche-Comté must have
seriously tinctured the blood even in these parts. Champagne, too, may
be in the same category.
French Flanders, Artois, and part of Picardy are just more Romano-Keltic
and less German than the French provinces of Belgium. Normandy has its
peculiar and characteristic Scandinavian elements.
If France, then, be essentially and fundamentally Romano-Keltic, it is
the parts of which Orleans is the centre, where the mixture is in the
most normal proportions; as is shown by even the names of the provinces.
Brittany, Normandy, Flanders, Lorraine, Franche-Comté, Burgundy,
Provence, Gascony,--each of these indicates something either more or
less Roman and Keltic than the typical and central parts of the middle
Loire and Seine. Thus,--
1. Brittany is more Keltic, and consequently less Roman.
2. Normandy, is not only Romano-Keltic, but Scandinavian.
3. Flanders, more or less German.
4. Lorraine, the same.
5. Franche-Comté and Burgundy, Frank and Burgundian, _i.e._, German.
6. Provence, inordinately Roman; the basis being Ligurian, and the
superadded elements Gothic and Arab.
7. Gascony--Roman on an Iberian basis.
It is now time to consider the physical and moral characters of the
ancient Kelts. It is just possible that, from the admixture of German
and other blood, the average stature of the Italians may have increased;
so that the difference between a Gaul and an Italian may have been
greater in the time of Cæsar than now. That the stature of the French
and Germans has decreased is improbable. Be this, however, as it may,
the evidence not only of the second-hand authorities amongst the
classics, but of Cæsar himself, is to the effect that the Gauls when
compared with the soldiers that were led against them, were taller and
stouter. “The generality despise our men for their shortness, being
themselves so tall.” Thus writes Cæsar. A good series of measurements
from ancient graves, would either confirm or overthrow this and similar
testimonies. For my own part, I am dissatisfied with them. The habit of
magnifying the thews and sinews of the conquered, is a common habit with
conquerors, and Cæsar had every motive for giving their full value to
his Gallic conquests great as they really were. Again,--we may easily
believe that both the slaves who were bought and sold, and the
individual captives who ornamented the triumph were picked men; as also
would be those who were “butchered to make a Roman holiday” in the
amphitheatres.
Again,--differences of dress and armour have generally a tendency to
exaggerate the size of the wearers; and hence it is that the Scotch
Highlanders, amongst ourselves, are often considered as larger men than
they really are. All who have investigated the debated question as to
the stature of the Patagonians, have recognized in the bulky, baggy
dress, a serious source of error in all measurements taken by the eye
only.
Nevertheless, the external evidence is to the great stature of the
ancient Gauls: evidence which the present size of the French slightly
invalidates. As far, too, as my knowledge extends, the exhumations of
the older skeletons do the same.
As to their hair, whether flaxen, yellow, or red, it was _light_
(ξἁνθος), rather than dark. Livy applies to it the term
_rutilatæ_ suggesting that it was _reddened_ rather than simply _red_,
and Diodorus Siculus expressly states that it was so; artificial means
being used to heighten the natural hue.
A long list of Keltic gods can be made out, if we allow to the Keltic
Pantheon every deity whose name can be found in inscriptions, or whose
_cultus_ has been attributed to the _Galli_. But it is not safe to admit
this.
It is by no means certain that even the Galli of northern Italy held a
common religion with those of Gaul; and still less is it certain that
the numerous tribes like the Scordisci, and others of the Tyrol, Styria,
and Carniola, were Gallic; although both Roman writers call them
_Galli_, and Greek, _Galatæ_. Neither are inscriptions conclusive. I
doubt, indeed, whether they be even _primâ facie_ evidence. We find them
generally, as may be expected, in the neighbourhood of the towns. Of
these many were military posts. Now the cohorts that occupied them were
Dacians, Moors, Germans, Spaniards, Pannonians,--anything, in short, but
Romans. What then are we to say, when an inscription to such a goddess
as Isis is dug up,--as has actually been the case in Britain? Not that
Isis was a British divinity, but that the garrison consisted of her
worshippers. In the way of detail, however,--
_Hesus_ and _Teutates_, as Gallic gods, rest on the authority of Lucan.
_Taranis_, whom he also mentions, has a further claim to notice. By
supposing him to be the God of _Thunder_, we find his name in the
present Welsh _taran_.
“Et quibus immitis placatur sanguine diro
Teutates, horrensque feris altaribus Hesus,
Et Taranis Scythicæ non mitior ara Dianæ.”
_Belenus_ rests on the authority of Ausonius; and as he was worshipped
in the Italian town of Aquileia, he may fairly be considered as common
property to the Galli of Gaul, and the Galli of Italy. At the same time,
Tertullian assigns him to the _Norici_, who were, probably, other than
Gauls; whilst his name has a look suspiciously Slavonic, since _bel_ may
be the first syllable in _bjelibog_, the _white god_.
_Ogmius_ seems to be a true Gallic name, and we learn from Lucian that
his attributes were intermediate to those of Hercules and Mercury.
_Peninus_ was, perhaps, the name of a locality rather than a deity;
although Livy writes _Deus Penninus_. The name evidently contains the
Keltic word _pen_, and signifies probably some sacred mountain-top
amongst the Pennine Alps.
_Andorta_ was a goddess of victory, and _Epona_ one of horses; the
latter belonging to the Gauls of Italy.
All these may fairly be considered Keltic; though the evidence for none
of them is conclusive. The names that are supplied by
inscriptions--names which, like the previous ones, I take from Zeuss
without having examined the details--exhibit a remarkable preponderance
of the termination -_enn_-, or _neh_-. Thus we have Nehal-_ennia_,
Ruma-_nehæ_, Vacalli-_nehæ_, Maviat-_inehæ_, Gesat-_enæ_, Etrai-_enæ_,
Aserici-_nehæ_, and Leher-_ennius_. I can throw no light on the
termination. Two other names ending in -_ast_, Arbog-_ast_ and
Morit-_ast_, seem Slavonic; and, as such, are probably referable to some
garrison.
_Dusius_ has a better claim than any word hitherto mentioned, since it
exists in the present word _deuce_.
It is little, then, that the minute ethnologist can add to the current
description of the ancient _Druidism_, for by that name it is convenient
to express the Paganism of Britain, in which Gaul, to a certain degree,
shared. The Druid as the priest, and the Bard as the poet--such are the
native names in the Gallic religion and literature. That certain deities
were analogous to the Roman Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva,
is expressly stated, but what names each bore, and how close the
parallel ran is unknown. “Deum maxime Mercurium colunt: hujus sunt
plurima simulacra, hunc omnium inventorem artium ferunt, hunc viarum
atque itinerum ducem, hunc ad quæstus pecuniæ mercaturasque habere vim
maximam arbitrantur. Post hunc, Apollinem et Martem et Jovem et
Minervam. De his eandem fere quam reliquæ gentes, habent opinionem:
Apollinem morbos depellere; Minervam operum atque artificiorum initia
transdere; Jovem imperium cœlestium tenere; Martem bella regere.”
Their social constitution was a system of chiefs, retainers, and slaves;
nevertheless, the full development of such a form of government is not
easily to be reconciled with the existence of towns or cities, and such
centres of regular industry as we know the ancient Gauls to have
possessed. Whatever it may have been in the Belgic area, there are good
reasons for believing it to have been considerably modified in the
southern and central parts of Gaul.
The Gauls knew the use of the Greek alphabet, they cultivated land, they
built towns. It is impossible, in the face of this, to allow them a
capacity for civilization less than that of the Iberians, or even than
the Italians themselves, so far as these last were not improved by Greek
and Etruscan influences.
That, contrasted with the Germans, they displayed a great mobility of
temper, is likely enough. To the literature and political power of Rome,
after the reduction of Gaul to a province, they contributed
largely--less, perhaps, than the Spaniards who gave to their conquerors
Seneca and Lucan as writers, and Trajan and Adrian as rulers, but still
largely: for Cornelius Gallus, in the palmy days of Roman literature,
and Ausonius in its decline, as well as others, had Gallic blood in
their veins.
Their aptitude for war can scarcely be measured by the early Gallic
aggressions on the Republic. He is a bold man who would say that the
Teutones and Cimbri were Keltic at all, whilst, in respect to the Galli
of Brennus, the Insubrians, the Cenomani, and other Gauls of the second
Punic war, they were Cisalpine rather than Gallic Kelts. Still, they
were Kelts--though Kelts beyond the pale of the Keltic fatherland. The
same applies to the Boii.
I must now change the subject to remark that those differences of blood
and pedigree, corresponding with (but, by no means, necessarily,
creating) a difference of habits and civilization which the previous
investigations have afforded, are only good up to the thirteenth
century; so that it must not be supposed that those peculiarities
(whatever they were), which the Ligurian and Iberian bases, the earlier
admixture of Romans, the subsequent influence of the Goths, and the
final introduction of Arab and Spanish elements evolved, exist at the
present moment. If it were so, the difference between the northern and
southern French would be greater than it really is. I do not say whether
this is little or much. I only say that, had the original influences and
intermixture taken their course, the present French of Languedoc and
Provence would show certain characteristics which they have now lost,
or, if they retain them, exhibit in a slighter degree. But in the
thirteenth century, the north of France was turned against the south.
There are good writers who put so high a value on the admixture of Arab
and Hispano-Arabic influences as to have persuaded themselves that
Provence and part of Gascony were on the high road to Mahometanism when
the Albigensian crusade arrested their career. One would willingly
believe that there was some reason for one of the most horrible
campaigns of history, which might, as far as a murderous fanaticism can
be put under the shadow of an excuse, palliate its atrocities. The
physical historian, however, looks only to its more material effects;
and these were to replace a vast proportion of the French of the
southern by the French of the northern type and lineage; for this is the
effect of wars of extermination, or (hoping that such have never existed
in the full extent of the dire import of the word) of those conquests
that either lust or fanaticism teaches to simulate them. I shall quote
Sir James Stephen to show that the Albigensian Crusade was of the kind
in question. He has given, with painful eloquence, the sickening details
of the wars under Simon de Montfort:--
“The church of the Albigenses had been drowned in blood. Those supposed
heretics had been swept away from the soil of France. The rest of the
Languedocian people had been over-whelmed with calamity, slaughter, and
devastation. The estimates transmitted to us of the numbers of the
invaders and of the slain, are such as almost surpass belief. We can
neither verify nor correct them; but we certainly know, that, during a
long succession of years, Languedoc had been invaded by armies more
numerous than had ever before been brought together in European warfare
since the fall of the Roman empire. We know that these hosts were
composed of men inflamed by bigotry, and unrestrained by
discipline,--that they had neither military pay nor magazines,--that
they provided for all their wants by the sword, living at the expense of
the country, and seizing at their pleasure both the harvests of the
peasants and the merchandise of the citizens. More than three-fourths of
the landed proprietors had been despoiled of their fiefs and castles. In
hundreds of villages, every inhabitant had been massacred. There was
scarcely a family of which some member had not fallen beneath the sword
of De Montfort’s soldiers, or been outraged by their brutality. Since
the sack of Rome by the Vandals, the European world had never mourned
over a national disaster so wide in its extent, or so fearful in its
character.”[7]
From the beginning of the thirteenth century to the present time
everything has had a tendency to amalgamate the component ethnological
elements of France--to make it a country of one nation, rather than the
area of many varieties. Its _civil_ history, however, is the source for
our knowledge of all this.
* * * * *
The ethnology of Belgium is comparatively simple. Its elements are the
same as those of Northern France,--Keltic, German, and Roman; for the
analysis (as has perhaps been observed) grows simpler when we passed the
Seine. And this was but natural, as the scene receded from the great
centre of conquest and the great points of international contact.
In Belgium the Roman element is somewhat less, the occupation being
somewhat more imperfect; whilst the Keltic basis is referable to the
Belgic variety--a point in which Picardy, French Flanders, Artois, and
part of Champagne agree.
In Belgium the German element is more uniform, _i.e._, it is more
exclusively referable to a single division of the German stock. No
Goths, no High-German Burgundians are here; but Franks of the Lower
Rhine the followers of Clojo and Clovis; Franks from the Ysel or
_Salian_ Franks; Franks whose chief locality in the country that they
conquered was the parts about Tournay in Hainault; Franks who, if they
differed at all from the Franks of Charlemagne, whose line subsequently
replaced that of Clovis, did so but slightly; Franks, too, of the
Platt-Deutsch division of the German stock, whose nearest
representatives are the Dutch of Holland, and the Low-Germans of Cleves,
Juliers, and Berg. I believe that whether the kings of these Germans
ruled from Tournay or from Aix la-Chapelle, the section to which they
belonged was the same, herein differing from those writers who, because
Charlemagne was an Austrasian, contrast his descent somewhat strongly
with that of Clovis.
To begin, however, with the earliest ethnological history of Belgium, I
remark that the same question which presented itself in the case of
Alsatia re-appears here. Were the oldest known occupants of the country
Gauls, or Germans, or Germanized Gauls? I believe that they were the
latter, though not to any great extent; for it must be remembered that
Treves, Juliers, and Berg, where the modification was considerable, lie
beyond the Belgic frontier. Still, as Tongres (a locality which the
express evidence of Tacitus makes German) is in Belgium, and as Cæsar
calls the Nervii, Pæmani and others, _Germans_ (by which I understand
that they belonged to a Germanic confederacy) the existence of a
considerable and early intrusion of the tribes beyond the Rhine must be
admitted. So that the Romans, when they reduced Belgium, reduced a
country which, like Alsatia, although Gallic, was also _Quasi_-Germanic.
But they reduced it, and they Romanized it; and as we find the more
active emperors coercing the Batavi, Chamavi, and other populations
beyond the Rhine, we may reasonably suppose that they Romanized it
throughout.
The analogue to the Burgundian conquest of Burgundy and Franche-Comté
began in the fourth century, and not with the invasion of Clovis, as is
often imagined. Constantius and Julian had to defend the frontier by
land, and Carausius the Menapian by sea. And Julian was the last emperor
who defended it successfully. At the beginning of the fifth century a
Frank chief, not less formidable than Clovis, although less famous,
Clojo, invaded Gaul, and penetrated as far as the Somme. Hainault,
Brabant, and West Flanders he seems to have permanently reduced; and
what Clojo left undone, Clovis completed.
In the reign of Charlemagne, the process of Germanizing went on, but
soon after his death it came to a close; so that about four hundred
years is the time that must be allowed for the displacement of the
Romano-Belgic language of Belgium, _i.e._, of Antwerp, South Brabant,
Limburg, West Flanders, and Hainault; to which may be added French
Flanders, Artois, and the northern part of Picardy--for to this extent
it seems to have gone when it attained its _maximum_. And, then, a
reaction took place, and the French has encroached ever since. Artois,
French Flanders, and Northern Picardy have been wholly recovered in
respect to their language to France, and the Belgian provinces
partially. Such is the evidence of the _Flemish_ language in Belgium, of
the parts wherein it is still spoken, and of the traces of it in as far
south as the frontier of Normandy.
But it is not the only native language of Belgium--I say _native_,
because the French as it is spoken at Brussels and the towns is, to all
intents and purposes, as foreign a language as English is in Argyle or
Inverness. In Namur, Liege, and Luxembourg, the speech is what is called
_Walloon_, the same word as _Welsh_, and derived from the German root
_wealh_, a _foreigner_. By this designation the Germans of the Flemish
tongue denoted the Romano-Belgic population whose language was akin to
the French, and whom a hilly and impracticable country (the forest
districts of the Ardennes) had more or less protected from their own
arms. Now the Walloon is a form of the Romano-Keltic, so peculiar and
independent, that it must be of great antiquity, _i.e._, as old as the
oldest dialect of the French, and no extension of the dialects of
Lorraine, or Champagne from which it differs materially. It is also a
language which must have been formed on a Keltic basis, a fact which (as
stated elsewhere) is a strong argument against the doctrine of the Belgæ
of Cæsar and Tacitus having been Germans.
The Walloons, then, are Romano-Keltic; whereas the Flemings are Germans,
in speech and in blood--either Romano-Kelts Germanized, or else absolute
Germans; for upon the extent to which the Flemish language is a measure
of German descent, I venture no opinion. We must remember, however, that
as the Franks came from the other side of the Rhine, and from a not very
distant locality, the number of females who accompanied them may have
been considerable. Still, I think, that intermixture was the rule, and
purity of blood the exception.
In stature, the Flemish Belgians are larger men than the French, and, in
the country districts, more frequently fair-complexioned. In certain
families, too, there is a mixture of Spanish blood.
The Walloons are less bulky than the Flemings, dark-eyed and
black-haired.
The particular Germans who reduced the Flemish parts of Belgium, as well
as the north-western parts of France, were the Salii of Saal-land on the
Ysel in the parts about Zutphen and Deventer. But not alone. The Chamavi
of Hamaland were with them; and, probably tribes of Holland and the
Lower Rhine besides. Even there they were not altogether indigenous, as
will be seen when the ethnology of Holland comes under notice.
In the foregoing account Luxembourg, and Limburg, although politically
belonging to Holland, have been considered Belgian.
* * * * *
Switzerland, from having a Keltic basis, comes next in order. The
ancient Helvetia is at the present moment partly German, partly French,
partly Italian, and partly Romance; that is, if we look to its languages
and dialects only. Now as the last three tongues are derived from the
Roman, we may express the character of the Swiss tongues in more general
language, and reduce them to two great classes, the Gothic and the
Latin. This, however, will not give us the ethnology of the country,
since the blood is far more mixed than the speech. The analysis of this
is complex.
In the time of Cæsar the term Helvetia coincided with the modern country
of Switzerland sufficiently closely for all practical purposes of
general, perhaps for those of minute, ethnology also.
The Helvetii, also, of Cæsar were Kelts; so that the basis of the
population is Keltic--although the variety of that stock was probably a
very marked one.
The famous _Helvetian migration_ is one of the earliest and greatest
facts in the Swiss history. Orgetorix, a Keltic name, is the king. The
boundaries, on three sides, are well marked, but not on the fourth. The
Jura range separates them from the Sequani of Franche-Comté, the Rhine
from the populations of Baden and Wurtemburg (which Cæsar calls
_German_), and the Rhone and the Lake of Geneva from Savoy, which was
part of the Roman _Provincia_. The boundaries in the direction of the
Tyrol are undescribed, probably because they were unascertained. An
excess of population is the motive for their emigration. It is
undertaken with due foresight. Two years beforehand, they buy up all
kinds of vehicles and beasts of burden, and sow as much corn as the
ground will allow them. Alliances are sought with the neighbouring
powers. The Rauraci, Tulingi, Latobriges, and Boii, are asked to burn
their towns and join the expedition. The parts about Thoulouse are their
object. It is abortive. Cæsar defeats them and breaks it up; the
numbers of its component members being afterwards found to be as
follows:--
Helvetians, from Switzerland 263,000
Tulingians, from Savoy 36,000
Latobrigians 14,000
Rauraci, from Baden 23,000
Boii, from Bavaria 33,000
-------
Total 369,000
Of these, the number of warriors was 110,000, the rest being old men,
women, and children.
But as the historian of these movements is the conqueror of Gaul, we
must expect, ere long, the reduction of Helvetia to a Roman province. It
takes place as a matter of course. It is Cæsar who effects it; and the
process of Romanizing begins. The Roman language, however, I think,
extends itself into Switzerland from three points; from Gaul, from
Italy, and from the Tyrol. Such, at least, is the inference from the
present dialects; since in Tessino and the Valteline we have the
Italian; in Geneva and the Valais, the French; and in the Grisons, the
Romance.
This last requires notice. If we follow the Rhine from the Lake of
Constance, we are carried up into the narrow valley in which it rises,
and here the dialect is neither French nor Italian, but a separate
substantive tongue which, like them, is derived from the Latin, and
accordingly, it is known as the _Romance_ or _Rumonsch_ of the Grisons
or Graubünten. The Inn must then be traced upwards in like manner, when
in the valley of its head-waters, and the water-shed between it and the
Rhine, the Romance will be found again. It is reduced to writing and
spoken in several dialects and subdialects; so as to have all the
appearance of a language of long standing.
Now this, I imagine, represents the Latin of Rhætia--_i.e._, of the
Tyrol and Vorarlberg--rather than that of Gaul, and it was from the
Tyrol and Vorarlberg, conquered in the reign of Augustus by Tiberius and
Drusus, that it was introduced.
In few countries reduced by Rome must the blood on the mother’s side
have been more aboriginal than in Helvetia, and in few countries is the
extent to which the speech is Latin less a measure of the Latinity of
the descent.
Until the fifth century Switzerland was Keltic and Latin, even as France
was; and then mixture set in, partially. The Germans of Suabia and
Franconia, Germans of the High-German division, Germans by whom Alsatia,
Bavaria, Baden, Wurtemburg, Burgundy, and Franche-Comté, were
Germanized--some perfectly, some partially--extended their conquests to
the present cantons of Schwytz, Uri, Unterwalden, and the other cantons
of the German language; the populations of which are Keltic, Roman, and
_German_, those of the rest of Switzerland being simply Keltic and
Roman.
Switzerland, then, is the third country in which the basis is Keltic,
and the superadded elements Roman and German.
CHAPTER IV.
ITALY.--LIGURIANS.--ETRUSCANS.--VENETIANS AND
LIBURNIANS.--UMBRIANS.--AUSONIANS.--LATINS.--EARLIEST POPULATIONS
OF NORTH-EASTERN ITALY.--SOUTH ITALIANS.--ITALIAN ORIGIN OF THE
GREEKS.--SICILIANS.--ELEMENTS OF
ADMIXTURE.--HERULIAN.--GOTHIC.--LOMBARD.--ARAB.--NORMAN.--ANALYTICAL
SKETCH OF THE POPULATION OF MODERN ITALY.
The only part of Italy of which the ethnology is even moderately simple
is the part belonging to Sardinia, or Piedmont. Here the original
occupancy was Ligurian. Eporedia, the modern Ivrea, is particularly
mentioned as a Ligurian town, and, as its name has generally been
considered Keltic, it has supplied one of the arguments in favour of the
Ligurians being a branch of that stock. Bodencomagus, too, has already
been mentioned. The ancient name of the Upper Po, Eridanus, appears to
contain the same root as the name Rhodanus, and, perhaps, as Rhenus;
whilst Scingo-_magus_ and Rigo-_magus_ give us further instances of the
evidently Keltic termination -_magus_. The parts south of the Po, which
alone constituted the true and proper Liguria in the political sense of
the term, were reduced between the second and third Punic wars; the
following being Niebuhr’s account of them:--
“The Ligurian war is not only insignificant, in comparison with others,
but extremely obscure, on account of our want of an accurate
geographical knowledge of the country. It has some resemblance to the
present undertakings against the Caucasian tribes. The Apennines are
not, indeed, as high as the Caucasus, but they offer the same advantages
for their inhabitants to defend themselves. The Ligurians were
ultimately annihilated, which is always the unavoidable fate of such
nations, when a powerful state is bent upon their destruction. The
Ligurian tribes extended in reality as far as the river Rhone; but as
the Romans were chiefly concerned in securing the frontiers of Etruria,
they made themselves masters only of the territory of Genoa. The wars
did not extend beyond the river Varus, or the frontiers of Provence, for
the hostilities against the Salyes in the neighbourhood of Massilia
belong to a later period. The Ligurian tribes defended themselves and
their poverty with such resolute determination, that the Romans, who
could not expect any rich spoils, aimed at nothing short of extirpating
them, or expelling them from their mountains. The consuls, P. Cornelius
Cethegus and M. Bæbius Tamphilus, therefore transplanted 50,000
Ligurians into Samnium, where Frontinus, as late as the second century
of our own era, found their descendants under the name of the Cornelian
and Bæbian Ligurians. The war was brought to a close before that against
Perseus. It was especially for the purpose of exercising control over
Gaul that the high road of Flaminius, which went as far as Ariminum, was
now continued, under the name of _via Flaminia_, as far as Placentia,
and that the whole country south of the Po was so much filled with
colonies, that the Keltic population disappeared.”
But the parts to the north of that river were conquered later, the
Salassi of the valley of Aosta in the reign of Augustus.
How far the population which I consider to have been allied to the
Ligurian on the one side and the Helvetian on the other, may have
extended eastwards, is difficult to say; but the Tyrol was the centre of
a new stock. This stock was the Etruscan. It is needless to say that we
have now before us one of the _vexatœ quœstiones_ of ethnology.
The account of Herodotus is as follows:--
“The Lydians state amongst other things that they colonized Tyrsenia;
saying thus concerning it. In the days of Atys, the son of Manes, their
king, there was a severe famine over the whole of Lydia. For a while
the Lydians bore up; but, afterwards, when it would not cease, they
sought for a remedy. One invented one thing, one another; and then were
found out dice, _astragali_, the top, and all other kind of games; chess
alone being excepted. But when the evil would not abate, but, on the
contrary, pressed all the more, the king having divided the whole body
of Lydians into two parts, allotted to the one of them to stay at home,
and to the other a departure from the country. With the one that had to
stay at home, the king himself remained at the head; with the other his
son Tyrsenus. They then went to Smyrna, and having contrived a ship and
put therein all that was needful for their voyage, they sailed away in
search of a living, until, having passed by many nations, they came to
the Ombriki, where they settled cities, and where they remain to this
day. Instead of Lydians, they changed their name to that of the king’s
son, who led them, and, taking this, were called Tyrseni.”--I. 94.
Few passages of antiquity are better known than this, and the criticism
which has been bestowed upon it is proportionate to the difficulty of
the question upon which it bears. Niebuhr objected to it on negative
grounds; or rather, he affirmed the opinion of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus who had done so before him; as Xanthus, a native Lydian,
and an historian as well, had said nothing about this Tyrsenian
migration. And this objection may be strengthened. The statement that
the Etruscans of Tuscany called themselves _Tyrseni_ is inaccurate. The
native name was _Rasena_; and _Tyrseni_ was only what their neighbours
called them. Yet, according to the Herodotean account, if one name ought
to be more national than another, that name was the one derived from
their princely leader--Tyrsenus. The stoppage, too, of the expedition at
Smyrna, brings the date of the migration inconveniently low.
Prichard admits that “his (Dionysius’s) arguments weigh heavily against
the credibility of this story.” For reasons too lengthy to be given
here, I wholly disbelieve the Lydian tradition. On the contrary, I lay
what many may consider undue stress upon the account of Livy, who says
that “the dominion of the Tuscans was widely extended before the
prevalence of the Roman arms; their power was predominant on the two
seas which embrace Italy on both sides. Of this the names given to these
branches of the Mediterranean afford a proof; for the nations of Italy
have given to one of these seas the name of Tuscan, from the common
appellation of the people, and to the other that of Adriatic, derived
from Adria, a Tuscan colony. The Greeks term them Tyrrhenian and
Adriatic. The Etruscans, in either territory, possessed twelve cities.
Their first settlements were on this side of the Apennines on the lower
sea; they afterwards sent out as many colonies as the original country
contained principal towns, and these colonies occupied all the country
beyond the Po, as far as the Alps, except the corner belonging to the
Veneti. The same people, doubtless, gave origin to some of the Alpine
nations, particularly to the Rhæti; who, by the nature of the country
which they occupy, have been rendered barbarous, and retain nothing of
their ancient character, except their language, and that in a corrupt
state.”
The analysis of this extract will verify its importance. The last
sentence contains a statement in the way of evidence, and an opinion in
the shape of an inference. I admit the former, and demur to the latter.
The statement as to the language of the Rhæti being Etruscan, is that of
an author whose advantages of time, place, and circumstances were great.
As a native of Padua he was as well-placed for knowing how the Rhætian
differed from the Latin as a Lowland Scot is for giving evidence to the
distinct character of the Gaelic. On the other hand, he was the adviser
and reviewer of an antiquarian work of the Emperor Claudius on the very
subject of Etruscan history; so that, his testimony on this point, is
that of no common author. He speaks to what he had the means of knowing,
and he speaks to a cotemporary fact.
But the inference from this similarity of speech is a different matter;
one that the modern investigator, with a wider knowledge of the general
phenomena of ethnological distribution, may venture to correct. The
occupation of a mountain-range by the inhabitants of a plain country is
a reversal of the usual order of events. It is far more likely that the
mountaineers should have become refined under the influences of a
fertile soil, milder climate, and an enlarged commerce, than that the
Etruscans of Etruria should have become rude and barbarous. After all,
however, the question is only one of degree. It is no opinion of Livy’s
that the Rhætian Alps were colonized from the Etrurians of Tuscany.
Their occupants must have been derived from the plains at their foot,
from the Northern Etrurians of the Venetian territory and Lombardy; and
whether these extended a little more or a little less in the direction
of the Tyrol is unimportant. The primary fact is, that, according to the
only cotemporary evidence existing, the Valley of the Adige was as
Etruscan as the Valley of the Arno.
How far the Etrurians south of the Tyrol were indigenous populations,
or how far they were intrusive conquerors, is difficult, perhaps
impossible, to determine. It is difficult, too, to say where they came
in contact with the Ligurians, where they first encroached on the
Umbrians, and what boundary separated them from the Venetians and
Liburnians. Perhaps, we may give them all Lombardy, the western third of
the Venetian territory, Parma, Modena, Bologna, and Ferrara, I think
that in all these parts they were intrusive conquerors, and, _à
fortiori_, that they were intrusive conquerors in Tuscany. In Ferrara,
and the parts due north of the mouth of the Po, they were, for reasons
which will appear in the sequel, _necessarily_ so. In Campania they were
comparatively recent colonists.
The western third of the Venetian territory may easily have been
Etruscan, Rhætian, or Etrusco-Rhætian; the other two-thirds were
_Liburnian_, or _Venetian_, the country of the Veneti and Liburni. The
affinities of these populations, which were closely allied to each
other, was with the Illyrians of Dalmatia. In other words, it was only
in a political point of view that they were Italians at all. For some of
the higher questions of ethnology, however, the _Liburni_ and _Veneti_
are tribes of exceeding importance.
Now, if we are right in supposing the Ligurians to have been Kelts, the
earliest historical occupants of Lombardy, Etruscans, and the
Liburnians and Venetians members of a distinct stock, we have to go far
towards the south before we find the population with which the ideas
suggested by the term _Italian_ are connected; before we find a language
allied to the Latin, or before we find a civilization and polity akin to
that of the Romans. As far as we have gone hitherto, the nations of the
Po and Arno are as little Italian as the Basques are Castilian. They
have been the nation not _out of_ which, but in _spite of_ which Italy
became the country of the Italian language. No immediate affinities have
yet been found for Rome.
Language will be the chief test; and of the languages allied to the
Latin the most northern were the Umbrian and the Latin itself; the
former on the east, the latter on the west coast; the former spoken as
far north as the mouth of the Po (in lat. 45°), the latter no further
than that of the Tiber (in lat. 42°).
The particular division of those ancient Italian populations of which
the language was Umbrian rather than Latin or Oscan, occupied, at the
beginning of the historical period, the present districts of Urbino and
Perugia, but as there is strong _primâ facie_ evidence of their original
area having been much wider, as well as traditions (if not historical
records) of the Umbrians having suffered considerable displacement both
on the north and west, in the direction of Lombardy, and in the
direction of Tuscany, Ferrara, the Romagna, parts of Bologna and Tuscany
may be added to the Umbrian area in its oldest form. Southwards, too, it
may be carried to the March of Ancona, or the northern part of the Upper
Picentine. The ancient Umbrians consisted of separate tribes, of which
the one first known to the Romans was that of the Camertes. Yet they
were, at the earliest times, the cultivators of the soil, and the
builders of cities; and as the Umbrians, in general, passed for the
oldest occupants, their capital Ameria, was one of the oldest cities of
Italy. Pliny gives the date of its foundation as 381 years before the
foundation of Rome.
The Umbrians here meant are the people who used the language of what are
known as the Eugubine Inscriptions, so called from the place of their
discovery, Gobbio, the ancient Iguvium; which the researches of
Grotefend and others have shown to be undeniably akin to the Latin.
From the famous Sabines, in the strict sense of the word, and from the
Sabine population in its purest form, the Italians who may best claim a
descent are those occupants of that part of the states of the church
which lies due north of the Campagna di Roma, and is bounded by the
Tiber, the Teverone, the Nera, and the Apennines, the country people of
the parts about Narri, Otricoli, and Rieti. The Campagna di Roma is
pre-eminently _Latin_.
For the north-western Neapolitans in the Upper Abruzzo, the descent is
from the southern Piceni, the Vestini, the Frentani, the Peligni, the
Marsi, and other less important tribes, which it is difficult to
distribute, _i.e._, to say, how far they approached the Umbrian type in
the north, or the Samnite, in the centre of Italy. It is difficult, too,
to say whether some of them were Latin or Oscan most.
All this is difficult, but, except to the minute ethnologist,
unimportant. It is enough to remember that when we reach the ancient
Samnium and Campania, the type has changed, at least, in respect to
language; for the speech is neither Umbrian nor Latin, though the detail
of the differences and agreements between the Samnite and Campanian
dialects is difficult.
The language itself is the Oscan, or Opican, spoken at different times
as far north as the neighbourhood of Rome, and as far south as Bruttium;
where, however, it was not indigenous. It was common to Samnium and
Campania, but not to Lucania and Apulia, _originally_. The general name
for the nations that spoke it will be _Ausonian_.
The Oscan is known to us from inscriptions, and is, at the least, as
closely allied as the Umbrian to--
_The Latin._--I think the Latin was the language of the _more southern
of the earliest_ inhabitants of Etruria; so that at the time of the
foundation of Rome, important as it was destined to become afterwards,
it was in the position of the Cornish of Cornwall about three centuries
ago. It may also be compared with the modern Frisian of Friesland, a
tongue spoken at present over a small and unimportant area, but one
which was once spread far and wide over northern Germany. If the Welsh
were to reconquer England, or the Frisians Germany, the phenomenon which
I imagine to have been presented by the history of Rome would be
repeated. A people conquered up to a certain point react on their
conquerors, vanquish them, and a fourth of the world besides. This
opinion is, of course, the result of general ethnological reasoning,
rather than the testimony of historians; yet I am not aware of any
undoubted fact that it opposes. It stands or falls by the phenomena it
explains. The chief of these is the peculiar character of the Latin
language.
Is any one prepared to consider it the result of an intermixture of two
or more dialects?
Or to limit its original area to a district not twenty miles across?
For myself I do neither one nor the other. I look upon it as a separate
and independent mode of speech, even as the Umbrian and the Oscan, and,
I cannot think that the Seven Hills of Rome were sufficient to
constitute the area of its development. Yet to these it must be limited;
for the Etruscan reached below Veii, the Oscan to the neighbourhood of
Ardea and Præneste, and the Sabine below Cures; and it must be
remembered that, however like the two dialects may have been, the
_Sabine was not Latin_.
_The Etruscans of Tuscany were an intrusive and foreign population_ (if
this be not admitted the reasoning on it falls to the ground), and the
_earlier tribes that they dispersed were the Italians of the Latin
type_; for assuredly, if such Italians, other than those of Latium, ever
existed it is in the parts north of the Tiber that they are to be sought
in the first instance; since it is there that the evidence of
displacement is strongest. Something earlier than the Etruscans of
Etruria must have existed in the Patrimonio di San Pietro and the
southern part of Tuscany, and these, I imagine to have been Latins--just
as Devonshire was once Cornish, and would have been so again, had the
Cornishmen been to England, what the Romans were to Italy.
At the same time _some_ extension southwards and eastwards must be
allowed; since tradition, perhaps history, makes both the Sabines and
the Volscians more or less intrusive. The main extension, however, of
the populations of the Latin type was Etruria.
And now, before we go to Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, we must revert to
the parts on the Lower Po, the parts which, at the beginning of the
historical period, were occupied by Etruscans, more or less displaced by
Gauls--partially, at first, wholly, afterwards; the Gauls themselves
being about to be superseded by the Romans.
A statement has already been made to the effect that in Ferrara and the
country northwards, the Etruscans were necessarily _intruders_ rather
than aboriginal inhabitants. The reasons for this statement were
reserved. They will now be given.
The earliest populations of the Lower Po must have come under conditions
which, _unless we suppose them to have been intermediate to the Umbrians
and Liburnians_, the ancient Etruscans (unless _they_ were themselves
similarly intermediate) did not meet. They must have connected the
languages allied to the ancient tongues of Central Italy, with those of
ancient Noricum--the former being (as is admitted and generally known)
allied to the Latin, the latter (as is assumed for the present, but as
will be supported by reasons in the sequel) being Slavonic and allied to
the Servian, _i.e._, just what they are now, only in an older stage.
Now, whoever admits the validity of the valuable philological researches
of those scholars, who, by showing the extent to which languages
apparently as different as the German, the Greek, the Latin, the
Lithuanian, or the Russian, are essentially cognate, have reduced the
leading tongues of Europe to a single great class, falling, after the
manner of the classes in zoology and botany, into definite divisions and
subdivisions--a class which, though somewhat inconveniently denominated
Indo-European, is still, as far as it goes, a true and natural
group--must see the necessity of bringing the languages thus allied into
as close geographical contact as possible; since the divisions to which
they, respectively, belong, are the two most allied members of the class
in question. For that the Sarmatian and classical tongues are nearer
each other than the classical and German, the classical and Keltic,
notwithstanding the opinions of several eminent scholars to the
contrary, is a safe assertion; perhaps it is also the preponderating
opinion.
To connect, therefore, the areas where languages thus allied are spoken,
by areas belonging to transitional and intermediate populations is an
ethnological necessity; and, however much subsequent changes may have
obliterated such areas of connexion, however early those changes may
have occurred; however complete they may have been; and however much
they may have been followed up by others, the original continuity must,
_at one time or other, earlier or later_, have had an existence.
Unless we admit this, we must suppose that similar names for similar
objects, and similar inflections for similar moods, tenses, and cases,
have been developed independently of community of origin; a doctrine
upheld by few, and one which would require the most transcendental
philology to support it; a doctrine which, without condemning as
unreasonable, we may fairly say has never much influenced the current
doctrine of ethnologists.
Admitting it, however, we must recognise a long series of difficult
problems; problems that have so rarely been dealt with as to be
considered wholly new and foreign; problems that occur whenever two
allied tongues are separated from each other by any form of speech
_other than intermediate_. The languages thus related may be ever so
like, or ever so unlike; but as long as they are liker to each other
than those which intervene, the problem in question will recur, _viz._,
the reconstruction of the state of things that existed before the
original separation, and which is implied by the existing points of
similarity.
It occurs in Great Britain. No matter how unlike the Scotch Gaelic and
the Welsh may be, they are more like than the English that lies between
them.
It occurs, as will soon be seen, in the ethnology of Greece.
It occurs in the question before us; leading to the inference that if
both the Keltic of the Cisalpine Gauls, and the Etruscan of Circumpadane
Etrurians were less unequivocally Indo-European than the Slavonic of the
Norici and the Umbrian of the Umbri, the original occupants of the
intervening area must have been neither Gauls nor Etrurians, but one of
four things--
1. Members of the class to which the Umbrians belonged--
2. Members of the class to which the Norici belonged--
3. Partly Norici and partly Umbrians--
4. Transitional populations sufficiently different from each to
constitute a third class, but sufficiently allied to each to be more
Norican or more Umbrian than aught else.
Such is the way in which here, as elsewhere, we must attempt the
reconstruction of what may be called _areas of original connection_.
In the present case, then, north-eastern Italy was originally divided
between the true Italians, akin to the Umbri, and the extinct or
modified Slavonians of Liburnia and the country of the Veneti.
Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, to which we may now attend, I imagine, in
the earliest times, to have been occupied _by the ancestors of the
Greeks_, a doctrine to which I direct the careful consideration of
scholars; since it implies a great change in all our preconceived
opinions, and not only makes the Hellenes of Greece as foreign to
Hellas, as the Anglo-Saxons were once to England, but deduces them from
Italy, and that by means of a _maritime_ migration--a maritime migration
which implies not only that they were a population foreign to the Greek
soil, but that their descendants were a mixed stock; since no mode of
migration is less favourable to the purity of the migrant population
than a sea-voyage, where space is limited and females are an
incumbrance. Such was, undoubtedly, the origin of the Greeks of Asia
Minor and the Ægean Islands. Such, I believe, to have been the origin of
the Greeks of Peloponnesus and Northern Hellas.
The observations on the relation between the Slavonic and Latin
languages have prepared the way to this hypothesis, wherein the
necessity of finding a geographical connection between cognate forms of
speech recurs.
Now the connection between the Greek and Latin languages is a fact that
few have denied, and no one has explained. Unless we derive one from the
other, we must refer both to some common source. But the locality of
this mother tongue is difficult to fix--so difficult that no
satisfactory doctrine concerning it has ever been exhibited. Greece is
an eminently small area, and Italy is of no great size; for it must be
remembered that the ancient country of the nations whose language was
allied to the Latin, and, through the Latin, to the Greek, are not found
far north of the Tiber, at the beginning of the truly historical period.
The Valley of the Arno was Etruscan; the Valley of the Po, Gallic,
Etruscan, and Liburnian; so that the northern boundary of the more
western of the two classical languages was the Tiber, and that of the
most eastern one the Ambracian Gulf--for farther than this it is not
safe to carry Ancient Greece. Perhaps it cannot be carried so far.
Be this, however, as it may, the scholar who recognises the fundamental
affinity between the Greek and Latin languages, and at the same time
requires either an _original geographical continuity_ or a _series of
migrations_ to account for it, has a vast mass of difficulties to deal
with: and I cannot think that these have ever been fairly met. The
intervening area which lies between the Hellenes and Italians is of no
ordinary magnitude. It is not only larger than either Greece or Italy
separately, but larger than both put together. It is this if we give it
the most favourable conditions imaginable. It is this if we suppose
that, on the head of the Adriatic Gulf, there existed in early times a
population from which the Italians on one side, and the Greeks on the
other, are descended--at the head of the Adriatic Gulf, and no where
else.
I limit this hypothetical population to a small area, because, as no
trace of its existence can be found, the smaller it is supposed to have
been, the more easily its extinction is accounted for; and I place it in
a locality equidistant to Greece and Italy, because, by so doing, the
amount of its extension is diminished. The more distant we make it, the
more improbable that extension becomes; and the larger it is, the more
improbable its disappearance. I have put it, then, under the most
favourable conditions. Yet, even here, its position is eminently
doubtful. The first nations which we meet with in these quarters are the
Liburnians; and few have a less claim to be considered either Greek or
Italian, or, yet, intermediate to the two.
The bolder doctrine is the assumption of what has been called The
Thraco-Pelasgic stock. This maintains that the extinct populations and
languages of Thrace, Mœsia, and Pannonia were intermediate to those
of the two peninsulas, and that, by a sort of divarication, the western
extension of their southern members peopled Italy, and the eastern,
Greece. This view has the advantage of being difficult to refute--since
it is the current belief that the original languages of the three
countries in question are extinct, and that, as nothing is known about
them, it is as easy to say that they were the mother tongues of the
Greek and Latin as aught else. The assumed displacements, however, are
enormous; besides which, the ancient Thracians must have been more Greek
than were the ancient Italians; which is unlikely.
But the great difficulty in fixing a locality for this Thraco-Pelasgic,
or Helleno-Latin language (call it what we will) lies in a reason which
the reader of the first chapter of this book may, perhaps, anticipate.
It lies in the existence of the Albanian language; a fact, which I said,
on the onset, was one of such importance as to require being treated as
a special and separate preliminary to the ethnology of Greece and Italy,
as well as on its own merits. Whence came this remarkable tongue, and
whence the populations who speak it? For a long time both were
considered recent introductions,--introductions from Caucasus, perhaps,
or from some other locality equally plausible. But this origin is no
longer admitted by any competent investigator; and the modern Skipetar,
or Albanians, are now looked upon as the descendants of the ancient
Illyrians, and of such Epirots as were not truly Greek. So that the
Thraco-Pelasgic hypothesis is materially weakened by the inconvenient
locality, and the impracticable antiquity of this nation. So awkwardly
does it lie, that it fills up full two-thirds of the area required for
the hypothetical tongue in question.
Hence the line of such transitional populations as, by connecting Greece
and Italy, account for the ethnological affinities of their respective
occupants, must not be a straight one. On the contrary, it must trend
_round_ the Albanian country, _viâ_ Macedon, Thrace, Servia, Croatia,
and Carniola.
The assumption of a stream of population from Asia Minor across Turkey,
Servia, and the parts to the north of the Adriatic is the
Thraco-Pelasgian doctrine modified; since it deduces both tongues from a
common source.
The assumption of a similar stream across the islands of the Ægean does
the same. Yet each is beset with difficulties. If one fact be better
supported than another, it is that the Ægean islands and the Asiatic
coast were peopled from Greece rather than _vice versâ_.
So serious, then, are the difficulties involved in the notion of either
a continuous Helleno-Italian population originally extended from Greece
to Italy but subsequently displaced, or an isolated intermediate
locality from which both Hellenes and Italians were given-off as
colonies, that I would rather believe that the likeness between the
Greek and Latin languages proved nothing more than is proved by the
presence of Norman-French words in English (viz., simple intermixture
and intercourse) than admit it. I do not ask the reader to go thus far.
I only request him to compare the size of the Greek and Italian areas
with the size of the parts between them, which are neither one nor the
other. This will lead him to the threshold of the difficulties involved
in the usual views as to the _origin of the Hellenic population within
Hellas itself_; and, provided that he be willing to examine patiently
rather than reject hastily, an apparent paradox, it will also prepare
him for a train of reasoning of which the result will be a Greece, or
Hellas, as different from the Greece or Hellas of the current
historians, as England is different from Britain. By which I mean that,
if, by the term _Greece_ we denote the present kingdom of King Otho,
irrespective of its population, and with a view only to the portion of
the earth’s surface that it constitutes, the Hellenes will come out
Greek, just as the Anglo-Saxons are British, _i.e._, not at all. Instead
of this, the true and primitive Greeks will be the analogues of the now
extinct or modified Britons of Kent and Northumberland, the Hellenes
being those of the Angle, Frisian, and other Germanic conquerors of our
island.
But to catch it in its full clearness, the point of view from which the
physical history of the Hellenes is to be contemplated, the critic
should go somewhat further than this, and attempt his own reconstruction
of the state of those European populations which existed when the Greek
and Latin languages, with their several points of likeness and
difference, were first developed.
Let him try to do this by assuming that the necessary movements and
displacements were made by _land_, and he will find that it must be by
ringing changes upon such suppositions as the following--
1. Occupancy of Greece from Italy.
2. Occupancy of Italy from Greece.
3. Extension into Greece, on one side, or--
4. Into Italy, on one side, or--
5. Into both Greece and Italy--from some
common point different from each.
6. Absolute continuity of a Helleno-Latin population
from Calabria to the Morea.
In each of the first two alternatives there is the displacement of some
population earlier than the one--Greek or Italian, as the case may
be--which we supposed to have been immigrant.
In the three next there is the same; with the additional difficulty of
fixing the point from which the migrations diverged.
In the last there is the enormous displacement requisite to account for
the utter absence of any population transitional to the Hellenic and
Italian north of the Po on one side, and the Peneus on the other.
But this--as, indeed, are all the others--is reducible to a question of
displacement.
Now it is the last four of the previous alternatives that are the most
complicated. They are also those to which the current opinions most
incline. The term Thraco-Pelasgic indicates this: since it shows that,
instead of deriving the Greeks from the Italians, or the Italians from
the Greeks, both are deduced from a third population.
Upon this third population we must concentrate our attention; and define
our ideas as to its conditions.
If continuous, it must have been of considerable magnitude: and even if
isolated, it can scarcely have been very small. Now the greater we make
it the more mysterious is its present non-existence.
It must have spoken a language intermediate in character to the Hellenic
and Italian. Unless it did this it is of no avail. To be simply like the
Greek is not enough; nor yet to be what is called Indo-European. It must
be sufficiently transitional in character to act as a link.
It must have been either ancient Albanian, which it cannot have been,
ancient Thracian, which it is unlikely to have been, or, some third
language winding itself into continuity between the most south-western
Thracians and the most north-eastern Illyrians, _i.e._, populations akin
to the Skipetar.
So much for its conditions on the side of Greece. As it approached Italy
they must been equally mysterious. Unless we suppose the Liburnians and
Venetians to have spoken such a tongue it must have lapped round the
area of the northern populations of the Adriatic, so as to be thrown
considerably westwards. But, to all appearances, Circumpadane Etruria
began where the Veneti and Liburni left off.
The special classical scholar best knows how far the Pelasgi--how far,
indeed, any ancient populations--fulfil these conditions. Of course, by
assuming an unlimited amount of displacement and migration they can be
made to do so. But such assumed displacements may be illegitimately
large. Whether they are so or not depends upon the extent to which they
are necessary.
Such is a sketch of the difficulties involved in the hypothesis that
Greece and Italy were appropriated by similar populations by means of
migrations by _land_.
A little consideration will show that by looking to the _sea_ as the
medium of communication we get rid of the gravest of the previous
difficulties; though it must be admitted that we get another in the
place of it. It may fairly be urged that conquests by sea are less
complete and perfect than those by land; so that though they may be
admitted as explanatory of settlements on the coast, they are
insufficient to account for the reduction of the more inland and
mountainous parts of a country. This is an objection as far as it goes:
yet it would be hazardous to say that either Greece was more purely
Hellenic, or Italy more exclusively Italian, at the beginning of their
respective historical areas, than England was Anglo-Saxon in the reign
of Alfred. Yet the Anglo-Saxon conquest was maritime.
That, at the very earliest dawn of the historical period, there was a
great amount of Greek elements in Southern Italy is universally
admitted; the only doubtful point being as to the way of explaining
them. They fall into two classes--
1. Those that are accounted for by colonization from Greece to Italy
within the historical period.
2. Those that are not so explained.
It is the latter upon which a partial confirmation of the doctrine of
the present chapter is based.
_a._ The Æolus of Homer, who in spite of some difficulties of detail, we
must look upon as the eponymus of Æolia, has his residence in the
islands off the south coast of Italy; and, it must be remembered, that,
except so far as this Æolus is the eponymus he is here considered to be,
Homer knows nothing of the Æolians.
_b._ The Ionian Sea is the sea that washes the coasts of Italy, and not
the sea which comes in contact with the shores of _Ionian_ Asia.
_c._ Old geographical names, significant in the Greek language, are
commoner in Southern Italy and Sicily, than in Greece itself; as
Phalacrium Promontorium, Nebrodes Mons, Clibanus Mons, Petra, Xiphonia
Promontorium, Crotalus Fluvius, &c. Nowhere are these commoner than in
the Sicanian country, the part generally considered the most barbarian,
but, more probably, the part where the character of the aborigines
survived longest--Panormus, Ercta, Bathys Fluvius, Cetaria (probably a
fishery), Drepanum, Selinus, Ægithallus. Almost all the islands have
names more or less Greek, Strongyle, Phœnicodes, Ericodes, and a
great number ending in -_usa_, as Pithec-_usa_, &c. Ortygia, is
mentioned by Hesiod.
_d._ The names which, in Greek, end in -οεις take, in Southern Italy,
the older forms in -_ntum_--as Μαλοεις, Maleve_ntum_; Σολοεις,
Solve_ntum_.
_e._ The Greeks themselves recognise the existence of colonies planted
by their forefathers in Italy long anterior to the beginning of the
historical period, _e.g._, that of Cumæ, seventeen generations before
the Trojan war. This may fairly be construed into an admission of their
ignorance as to their origin.
_f._ The epithet _Magna_ in _Magna Græcia_ as applied to Southern Italy,
is an adjective which in every other instance of its use, denotes the
_mother country_--the _colony_ being designated by the contrary epithet
_little_.
_g._ The _cultus_ of the eminently Greek goddess, Demeter, was in the
eminently Sikel district of Henna.
_h._ The recognition of Xuthus, the father of Ion, an eponymus strange
to Hellenic Greece, as one of the six sons of Æolus, in the Sicilian
genealogies, genealogies which are evidently of independent
origin.--“Xuthus was king over the Leontine country which, even now, is
called Xuthia; Agathyrnus, of the Agathyrnian country, who built the
city called after him, Agathyrnus.”--Diod. Sic. v. 8.
The foregoing facts are unimportant and unsatisfactory if taken by
themselves. Neither do they constitute the main argument in favour of
the Italian origin of the Greeks. That lies in the necessity of
effecting a geographical continuity between the Greek and Latin
languages, and the inordinate difficulty of doing so by means of an
extension of either of the areas northwards.
The weightiest objection to it is the following. If the southern
Italians were so closely allied to the Greeks as the present doctrine
makes them, how came the later colonists not to discover the affinity?
Surely the settlers at Croton, Sybaris, Thurii, and the towns of Sicily,
would not have failed to find out that they had cast their lot amongst
cousins and kinsmen of their own stock, if such had actually been the
case. They would have found out that the populations with which they
came in contact spoke Greek--possibly with solecisms--but still Greek. I
reply to this by stating that, if, in (say) the reign of Edward the
Confessor, the English descendants of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of
Britain in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries had colonized the
coasts of their mother country, they would not, unless they had hit upon
a few exceptional localities, have found out, from the evidence of
language or manners, that they had revisited the land of their fathers.
The language had changed, and the population had been mixed and
displaced. The Franks had conquered the tribes originally akin to the
Saxons. Now that which the Franks did with the Saxons of Germany, the
Lucanians and Bruttians seem to have done with the original Greeks of
Italy. Such is the doctrine; such the chief objection to it; and such
the answer.
Another arises from the following words:--κὑβιττον, λἑπορις, πατἱνη,
κἁτινος, μοἱτον, γἑλυ, and νἑποδες. They are glosses from the Greek
writers of Sicily. They are _not_ Greek. They _are_ Latin--_cubitus_,
_lepus_, _patina_, _catinus_, _mutuum_, _gelu_, _nepotes_. I admit this
to be weighty. Nevertheless, as the Sicilian dialects are considered
to connect the Greek with the Latin, their presence is not conclusive.
Besides this, the Sikeli were, probably, more Italian than the Sikani.
There were Epirote (Skipetar) elements in Southern Italy; since several
names were common to both sides of the Ionian Sea--Chaones, Molossi,
Acheron, Pandosia.
There were Pelasgians (whatever the Pelasgians may have been) also; as
is to be inferred from the mention of the slaves of the colonists being
so called.
The name by which the south Italian stock, the parent stock of the
Hellenes, is best denoted is uncertain. The adjective _Œnotrian_,
from the Œnotri, is suggested.
It is wholly unnecessary to assume the existence of a new stock for the
population of ancient Sicily. The south Italians seem to have extended
themselves to the island, and when we first find them there, we also
find fresh evidence of their Greek character, as has already been shown
in the geographical names of the Sikanian area.
At the same time they must have fallen into two or more well-marked
varieties; varieties which are easily accounted for. There were the
earliest occupants of the island, and there were recent immigrants from
Italy, differing from each other as the present Danes of Iceland do from
the native Icelanders. For in this way I interpret the difference
between the _Sik_-eli and the _Sik_-ani, not doubting that both come
from the same root; although the authority of Thucydides is against this
view.
Thucydides’s account is as follows. In the western part of the island
were the _Sikani_, from the river Sikanus, driven thence by the
Iberians. Then came the Sikeli, driven from Italy by the Opiki. Thirdly,
there were the Elymi of Eryx and Egesta, who were originally Trojans,
but who escaped to Sicily, and settled themselves on the Sikanian
frontier, having built the cities of Eryx and Egesta. A few Phocians
(also from Troy) joined them, having first gone over to Libya. The
Phœnicians held certain settlements on the southern coast; Motye,
Soloeis, and Panormus. Lastly, came the Sikeliôts, or Greeks of Sicily,
whose colonies were as follows--
_a._ Naxos from Khalcis in Eubœa; Leontini and Katana from
Naxos.--Ionic.
_b._ Syracuse from Corinth; Acræ, Casmenæ, and Camarina, from
Syracuse.
_c._ Megara from Megara; Trotilus and Selinus from Megara.--Doric.
_d._ Gela from Rhodes and Crete; Akragas from Gela.--Doric.
_e._ Zankle from the Campanian Cuma, itself Chalcidic in
origin.--Ionic.
A reference to his own text justifies our disbelief in the essential
difference between the Sikani and the Sikeli, implied by Thucydides.
That such was the case was the opinion of only the historian; whilst, on
his own showing, it was not the opinion of the Sicanians themselves.
After the Cyclopes and Læstrygones the “Sikani are the first
inhabitants. As they say themselves, they are even earlier, being
_autokhthones_; but, in real truth, they are Iberians from the river
Sikanus, driven out by the Ligyes; and from them the island as well was
named Sikania, being first called Thrinakria.”[8] The Iberic doctrine is
evidently an inference from the name of the river; an inference which
the incompatible opinion of the Sikanians themselves opposes, and, in my
mind, outweighs. But the objections do not end here. The evidence of
Diodorus is as follows; _i.e._, that Philistus supported the Thucydidean
view, but that Timæus proved him wrong, and clearly showed that they
were Autokhthones. Hence, the testimony that we set against that of
Thucydides is the testimony of an equally competent local antiquary,
though an inferior general historian: for less influence than this
cannot well be attributed to the name of Timæus.
The statement respecting the Phocians is remarkable. It shows the
existence of Greeks anterior to the colonial era; Greeks whose presence
was inexplicable, except under the idea of a return from a doubtful
expedition.
Who the Elymæans really were is uncertain. Assuming that they
constituted a variety of the Sicilian population, and asking whence they
may best be derived, the answer is Sardinia--Middle Italy, and
Mauritania. In this latter case they belong to the original Libyan,
Gætulian, Numidian or Mauritanian stock, rather than the Punic. Or they
may have been Tuscans. Possibly, Phœnicians _direct_ from
Phœnicia, or Canaanites, or Jews.
That true Mauritanians, as opposed to the Phœnicians of Carthage,
existed, in at least one Sicilian locality, is a reasonable inference
from the name of a town on the eastern coast--_Thapsus_. This is a word
which now only occurs on the northern coast of Africa, but has a meaning
in the modern Berber, where _thifsah_ means _sand_; a likely name for
the low coast of the part which Virgil calls _Thapsum jacentem_.
In the Elymæan country were two rivers, one called _Simoïs_, and the
other _Scamander_. How they came to be called so is unknown. The effect
was to engender the story of the Trojan colony; unless, indeed, we
choose to argue that such a phenomenon proves too much, and is evidence
in favour of the reality of a Trojan war, and a subsequent dispersion of
Trojan colonists. Or they have been Sardinian _Tli_-enses.
The Carthaginian blood in Sicily was certainly foreign, and the Elymæan
was probably so. That of the Sikels was allied to the older Sikanian;
perhaps, as the Danish of the Northmen in England was to that of the
Anglo-Saxons. Such were the elements that came _into_ the island. But,
according to our hypothesis, there was an efflux out of it, to Æolian
and Ionian Greece, and, perhaps, to some of those parts of Asia and the
Ægean sea-board, which are claimed by the Hellenes as colonies from
their own shores. Subsequent to this there went on the contest between
the Sikani and Sikeli, even as the struggle between the Danes and
Saxons went on in Alfred’s time; whilst Sikeliot Greeks and
Phœnicians were making settlements on the coasts, and meditating a
contest for the supremacy over both. First from Sicily and Southern
Italy to Greece; then from Greece to Sicily and Southern Italy--such is
the hypothetic line of migration, analogies to which may be found
elsewhere. Sumatra, for instance, and the Malaccan Peninsula are
considered to stand in the same relation. The island (Sumatra) is first
peopled from the Peninsula, the tribes then occupying it being
comparatively rude and savage. But, in the island, civilization
increases, just as the South Italians are supposed to advance in their
social condition when transplanted to Hellenic soil. Thirdly, the
islanders (the Sumatrans), after the development of a powerful kingdom,
make settlements on the mother-country (the Peninsula of Malacca), and
(an important circumstance in our criticism) partly from the effect of
changes upon themselves, and partly from changes in the parent stock, no
recognition of the original affinity takes place. The aborigines of
Malaya look upon their sovereigns of the sea-coast as strangers,
themselves being considered what a Greek would call _barbarians_. The
true affinity is only known to the European ethnologists. So far, then,
is the present hypothesis from being deficient in analogies to support
it.
The historical period begins with the contest between the Greeks and the
Carthaginians as to who should hold in vassalage the Sikeli and Sikani;
with a subordinate series of jealousies between the Doric and Ionic
branches of the Greeks. Until about 300 B.C., the struggle is,
comparatively, uncomplicated. Afterwards, however, the free introduction
of mercenaries from Southern Italy, of Opican, Samnite, and Lucanian
origin, engenders new elements of admixture. The Carthaginian power
attains its height about this time. Then the island becomes the
battle-field between the two republics, and from 250 B.C., to 450 A.D.
(in round numbers), a period of 700 years, Sicily is a Roman province.
That the legionaries and officials were Roman in their political
relations only, is nearly certain. Ethnologically they must have been
chiefly South Italian. And the female part must have been native
Sicilian. What does this mean--Greek, Carthaginian, Sikanian, or
Sikelian? Any one in particular, or a little of each? The paramount fact
for this question is the evidence to the existence of Sikeli and Sikani
up to the reduction of the island. From then we hear no more of them:
not, however, because they are known to have become extinct, but because
their relations to Greece have ceased, and the historians who might
mention them are wanting. Rome had no contemporary literature; and when
it had, the Sicilian was known only as opposed to the Roman; for the
writers use the word _Siculi_, in a general sense, making no distinction
between the _Sikel_, the _Sikan_, and the _Sikeliot_. They were treated,
however, as Greeks, not as barbarians; and the Latin language was not
forced upon them. This is an inference from more than one expression in
Cicero’s Oration against Verres, where they are spoken of as
Greek.--“Novum est in Siculis, quidem, et in omnibus Græcis monstri
simile.”--ii. 11. 65. Again, “Itaque eum non solum patronum istius
insulæ sed etiam _sotera_ inscriptum vidi Syracusis.”--_Ibid._ 63.
If the Romans disturbed the ethnology but little, the question is
reduced to the extent to which the Greek colonies either displaced the
earlier inhabitants, or effected an intermixture. Of Ducetius, a Sikel
king, powerful in the middle of the island, we hear in the times between
Gelon and the Athenian invasion; and of other less important chiefs
(some with Greek names), we hear until the first Punic war. They are
always, however, Sikel. Of the Sikanians, Elymæans, and the so-called
Phocian Greeks, little or nothing is said. At the downfall of the Roman
Empire, Sicily seems to have been Greek in speech, and Sikelo-Sikanian,
strongly crossed with Greek, in blood. Then came the piracies of
Genseric and his Vandals; then the invasion of the Goths of Theodoric;
then the island is reconquered by Belisarius as a general of the
_Eastern_ empire; none of which events were of much ethnological
importance. Not so the events of the ninth century. The Arab conquest
was a physical as well as a moral influence.
[Sidenote: A.D. 827-878.]
“With a fleet of one hundred ships and an army of seven hundred horse,
and ten thousand foot, the Arabs landed at Mazara, but after some
partial victories, Syracuse was delivered by the Greeks, and the
invaders reduced to the necessity of feeding on the flesh of their own
horses; in their turn they were relieved by a powerful reinforcement of
their brethren of Andalusia: the largest and western part of the island
was gradually reduced, and the commodious harbour of Palermo was chosen
for the seat of the naval and military power of the Saracens. Syracuse
preserved about fifty years the faith which she had sworn to Christ and
to Cæsar. In the last and fatal siege, her citizens displayed some
remnant of the spirit which had formerly resisted the powers of Athens
and Carthage. They stood above twenty days against the battering-rams
and catapultæ, the mines and tortoises of the besiegers; and the place
might have been relieved, if the mariners of the imperial fleet had not
been detained at Constantinople in building a church to the Virgin
Mary. The deacon, Theodosius, with the bishop and clergy, was dragged in
chains from the altar to Palermo, cast into a subterranean dungeon, and
exposed to the hourly peril of death or apostasy; his pathetic, and not
inelegant complaint, may be read as the epitaph of his country. From the
Roman conquest to this final calamity, Syracuse, now dwindled to the
primitive isle of Ortygia, had insensibly declined; yet the relics were
still precious; the plate of the cathedral weighed five thousand pounds
of silver; the entire spoil was computed at one million of pieces of
gold (about four hundred thousand pounds sterling), and the captives
must have out-numbered the seventeen thousand Christians who were
transported from the sack of Tauromenium into African servitude. In
Sicily, the religion and language of the Greeks were eradicated; and
such was the docility of the rising generation, that fifteen thousand
boys were circumcised and clothed on the same day with the son of the
Fatimite caliph. The Arabian squadrons issued from the harbours of
Palermo, Biserta, and Tunis; a hundred and fifty towns of Calabria and
Campania were attacked and pillaged; nor could the suburbs of Rome be
defended by the name of the Cæsars and apostles. Had the Mahometans been
united, Italy must have fallen an easy and glorious accession to the
empire of the prophet; but the caliphs of Bagdad had lost their
authority in the west; the Aglabites and Fatimites usurped the provinces
of Africa; their emirs of Sicily aspired to independence, and the design
of conquest and dominion was degraded to a repetition of predatory
inroads.”[9]
A.D. 1029, Aversa was founded; a fact common to the history of both
Sicily and Southern Italy; from which the rule of the Normans in Sicily,
Apulia, and Calabria dates. Its details are those of a romance; the
deeds of a small but unscrupulous body of adventurers, too few to
impress any new character on the stock with which they came in contact.
Still they require mention, though but a handful of men. They were of
mixed blood themselves; Scandinavian on the fathers’, French on the
mothers’, side; French, too, in speech. They were recruited by
heterogeneous accessions from Southern Italy.
“Si vicinorum quis perniciosus ad illos
Confugiebat, eum gratanter suscipiebant:
_Moribus et linguâ_ quoscunque venire videbant
Informant propriâ, gens efficiatur ut una.”[10]
[Sidenote: A.D. 1204.]
The beginning of the thirteenth century sees the break-up of the Norman
power, and Sicily transferred to the empire; one of the more notable
facts of this transfer being the removal of sixty thousand Saracens to
Nocera, in the south of Italy. _Saracen_, however, though it means
Mahometan, by no means, necessarily, means Arab. Then we have the
dominion of the French, ending with the Sicilian Vespers, and the death
of eight thousand of them. Catalonians, Genoese, Modern Greeks, and
Albanians (?) complete the list of the elements of intermixture in
Sicily; notwithstanding which, and notwithstanding all the previous
immigrations, I believe the basis of the stock to be Sikel chiefly, and
next to Sikel, Greek.
[Sidenote: A.D. 400.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 406.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 476-490.]
With continental Italy the elements of admixture, until the time of
Odoacer, were due to the barbarian legions in the service of Rome,
rather than to the inroads of any barbarian conquerors; since Alaric,
with his Visigoths, Radagaisus, with his medley of Slavono-Germans,
Genseric with his Vandals, and Attila with his Huns, made but ephemeral
impressions. Of the army, however, of Radagaisus, a large proportion was
sold as slaves. Odoacer’s conquest was somewhat more permanent; whilst
the elements he introduced are uncertain. Reasons, however, may be given
for referring the Skiri, at least, and possibly the Heruli and Rugii to
the same stock as the Huns and Bulgarians--the Turk, a stock from which
few grafts were transplanted to Italy; though a Bulgarian colony in
Samnium was existing in the time of the Lombards, and possibly a few
other similar offsets besides.
[Sidenote: A.D. 490-553.]
The Gothic conquest, however, was not only permanent, but it was the
first of three from the same stock. Themselves, probably, of mixed
blood, having taken it up during their various settlements on the Lower
and Middle Danube, from the Slavonians and Turks of the countries with
which they came in contact, the Ostrogoths, to the amount of not less
than two hundred thousand, settled in the most favoured parts of the
country, and, dominant as they were amongst a population of serfs, must
have played much the same part in Italy as the Normans did in England.
And when Italy is recovered by Narses and Belisarius, more than one
hundred and fifty years after, they are only ejected from power--not
bodily put out of the land.
As has been stated already, they were only the first of three--we may
say of four--hordes of invaders, each of which was more or less
Germanic; for the Lombard dominion rapidly succeeded the Ostrogoth, and,
besides this, partial invasions of Bavarians, Suabians, and Alemanni
were, for a time, successful. But the Lombards ruled over all Italy with
the exception of the Exarchate of Ravenna, till the conquest by
Charlemagne, and over the present kingdom of Naples, under the name of
the Duchy of Beneventum, until the Norman Conquest. Of all the Germanic
elements, the Lombard is possibly the greatest. But it was no pure
strain.
[Sidenote: A.D. 774.]
The infusion of Slavonic and Turk blood amongst the followers of Alboin
was considerable.
For Calabrian and Apulian Italy the history is nearly the same as that
of Sicily.
Now, if after the sketch of these numerous elements of intermixture we
ask which part of Italy is most Roman, the answer gives but a small
proportion of that illustrious blood. Taking the narrowest view of the
question, and distinguishing the Latin area from the Oscan, Umbrian, and
Etruscan, the amount is inordinately insignificant--and Rome itself was
but a mixture. By generalizing, however, our language, and making
_Roman_ identical with _Italian_, we gain a larger area, coinciding
pretty closely, though not exactly, with the States of the Church. This
is the least mixed part of Italy, as well as the most Italian; the least
mixed because it is south of the pre-eminently German, and north of the
pre-eminently Arab area of invasion, and the most Italian, because the
original basis was Umbrian, and Sabine rather than Etruscan, Gallic,
Ligurian, or Œnotrian.
Piedmont, perhaps, is the next in order of comparative purity; at least,
as far as modern intermixture is concerned: the oldest basis being
Ligurian.
In Lombardy the elements are Umbrian, Etruscan, Gallic, Roman,
Ostrogoth, and Lombard; in the Venetian territory, Umbrian, Etruscan,
Gallic, Roman, Ostrogoth, Lombard, and _Slavonic_ (_Liburnian_); in the
kingdom of Naples, Ausonian and Œnotrian, with Greek, Arab, and
Norman superadditions.
CHAPTER V.
IMPORTANCE OF CLEARNESS OF IDEA RESPECTING THE IMPORT OF THE WORD
“RACE.”--THE PELASGI.--AREA OF HOMERIC GREECE.--ACARNANIA NOT
HELLENIC.--THE DORIANS.--EGYPTIAN, SEMITIC, AND OTHER
INFLUENCES.--HISTORICAL GREECE.--MACEDONIANS.--GREECE UNDER ROME
AND BYZANTIUM.--INROADS OF BARBARIANS.--THE SLAVONIC
CONQUEST.--RECENT ELEMENTS OF ADMIXTURE.
It may safely be said that the difficult question as to the relative
influences of the external effects of soil, climate, physical
conditions, the admixture of foreign blood, and the introduction of
foreign examples on the one side, and those of what is called _race_ on
the other, never rises to a greater degree of importance than it does in
the ethnology of Ancient Greece. For, in our current language, we
consider _race_ to mean certain original differences of organization,
faculties, and capacities stamped upon different divisions of the human
species from the beginning; innate qualities, as distinguished from mere
developments; internal elements of the original material upon which the
external agencies of climate, soil, and examples act in the different
degrees of its receptivity, as contrasted with the various agencies
themselves; and in this current language, many writers, who would shrink
from the conclusions to which the term logically leads, unconsciously
indulge. I say _unconsciously_, because it is nearly certain that, out
of ten writers who talk about _race_, and assign to the word a meaning
essentially the same as the one just exhibited, nine would be unwilling
to deny the unity of our species--unity meaning descent from the same
pair. Yet between this and a system of special interpositions the
advocate of the effects of race has no alternative. How can there be two
original capabilities for the reception of either moral or physical
influences, and the evolution of intellectual phenomena out of them, in
different members of a family descended from a single pair?
All that can have had a beginning since the beginning of the species
itself is the manifestation of the several capacities by outward and
appreciable signs. The capacity itself must have existed from the first;
and the writer who considers that too great weight is attached to
external accidents, and too little to innate qualities, unless he admit
either the doctrine of a multiplicity of protoplasts, or extra-natural
changes in the faculties of the progenitors of certain favoured nations,
when he talks about _race_, only throws back the evolution of the
distinctive characters of the populations he may be considering to some
period more or less early. If the remote ancestors of the Greeks and the
remote ancestors of the Turks be referable to some common parentage, it
is mere verbiage to refer the differences between them to _race_, as an
ultimate and primary cause. It is no cause, but, itself, an effect--an
effect of influences immeasurably early in their actions, but still an
effect. For it is evident that of _race_, as it is called, there can be
but three causes--original difference of parentage, preternatural
changes in the faculties or organization of certain members of one
common family, or the operation of the ordinary agencies of climate,
nutrition, and ideas.
I neither deny nor assert that any one of these three causes is the true
one. I only draw attention to a remarkably common inconsistency. A very
little amount of ethnological literature will satisfy any one who makes
the search that the number of writers who write about _race_, and who
are, nevertheless, wholly unprepared for either of the first two
explanations of its origin, is very great. So that they admit the third,
and the third only. If so, why make so much of the distinction?
In the special question before us we are in great danger of overvaluing
this undefined element; imagining that intellectual pre-eminence of the
highest kind was the original endowment of a section of mankind called
Hellenes. That these Hellenes were so favoured is certain, but that they
were a _race_ at all is doubtful. Unless the necessity of connecting the
Latin and Greek languages in geography as well as in philology have been
overvalued, and, along with it, the difficulty of doing so by any simple
extension of the two areas, the natural inference from the necessary
consequences of a maritime migration follows as a matter of course,
viz., the probability of the blood on the mother’s side having been
different from that of the father--the one Italian, the other native to
the soil. If so, there is an Hellenic language, an Hellenic literature,
an Hellenic influence in the world’s history. But there is no Hellenic
stock. The tongue belongs to Hellas, and the blood to Italy.
Subject, then, to the correctness of the Italian hypothesis, what was
the native stock of Hellas? Pelasgic. What means this? The proper place
for this inquiry is the chapter on the ethnology of Turkey, for in two
Turkish localities only have any Pelasgi existed within the historical
period. A negative statement, however, will find place here. Whatever
the Pelasgi were, they were not, at one and the same time, the earliest
occupants of Hellas, and a population belonging to the same class with
the Hellenes. The reasons which lie against making the Hellenes
aboriginal to Greece lie also against any other Hellenoeid population.
The magnitude of the earliest historical Hellenic area is of importance.
Let Greece under the leadership of Agamemnon be as truly Hellenic as
Kent and Essex were Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. What does it
prove in the way of the occupants being aboriginal? As little as the
English character of the counties in question at the time referred to.
Four centuries--or even less--of migration may easily have given us all
the phenomena that occur; for the area is smaller than the kingdom of
Wessex, or Northumberland, and the country but little more
impracticable.
Hence, if we sufficiently recognise the smallness of the Hellenic area,
no difficulties against the doctrine of an original non-Hellenic
population will arise on the score of its magnitude. It was as easily
convertible from non-Hellenic to Hellenic as Cumberland and
Northumberland have been from British to English.
And that that area was actually very small indeed is evident to any
inquirer who will take up the measure of it without any prepossessions
in favour of its magnitude, and limit his Hellas to those parts only
which can be shown to have been Greek; in order to do which he must
draw no undue inferences in favour of the identity of the Hellenic and
Phrygian languages from the negative fact of Homer saying nothing about
interpreters; build nothing on the ubiquity of the Pelasgi, every one of
whose migrations is as unsupported by historical evidence, as the
migration of Æneas to Italy, or that of Antenor to Venice; and, lastly,
satisfy himself with the “Catalogue of the Ships,” as the earliest
geographical notice of ancient Greece. I think that this list is more
likely to contain populations which were not Hellenic than to omit any
that were; and, with the single exception of the Acarnanians, I imagine
that this is the current opinion. The Acarnanians alone of all the
Hellenes are said to have taken no part in the Trojan war; and on the
strength of their non-intervention we hear of them some nine hundred
years afterwards, putting in a claim for the good offices of the Romans,
the supposed descendants of those Trojans whom the other Hellenes so
cruelly conquered, and the Acarnanians so generously left alone. Yet it
by no means follows that because the Acarnanians were Greeks during the
Peloponnesian war, they were Greeks in the ninth century B.C., any more
than it follows that because the men of Monmouth are English at the
present moment they were so during the heptarchy. What should we say to
the writer who, in the reign of Queen Victoria, should say that the only
people of England who took no part in the wars of the Saxons against the
Britons were the Cornishmen? Surely we should accuse him of an
anachronism, and suggest the fact of his Cornishmen having been at the
time in question, no Saxons at all, but _Britons_. The same reason
applies to the statements concerning the Acarnanians; inasmuch as it is
highly probable that they are absent from the Homeric list of Greeks,
because they were other than Greek in respect to their nationality. It
was only when the Greek frontier extended itself northwards that they
became Hellenized. Then, too, it was that the later writers who fancied
that they must always have been what they were in their own days,
superadded the doctrine of their having been Hellenic to the fact of
their non-appearance in the Homeric catalogue. For it must be remembered
that, even in the third century B.C.--nay even at the present
moment--the Acarnanians are a frontier population, in contact with the
non-Hellenic Illyrians of old, and the non-Hellenic Skipetars of the
nineteenth century. It must also be remembered that notice of their
absence from Troy is nowhere to be found in the Homeric poems. No
passage runs to the effect “that the Acarnanians alone took no share in
the war under the walls of sacred Ilion, but remained ingloriously at
home.” If it were so, the previous hypothesis would be futile.
Upon the whole, I think that Acarnania was in the same category with the
nearly opposite island of Corcyra--Greek in the time of the historian,
but not Greek in the time of the Homeric poems.
So little, however, depends upon this view of the character of the
earliest Acarnanians that the notice of them is rather an episodical
piece of detail, than anything affecting the general question of the
size of Homeric Greece. It may have contained Acarnania, and still have
been small enough for the purposes suggested, _i.e._, small enough to
have been converted from non-Hellenic to Hellenic within a very few
centuries.
On the eastern side of Greece the most northern members of the
confederation are the Thessalians and Perrhæbi; but whether the latter
were Hellenic is uncertain. We may admit them, however, to have been so.
Macedon and Thrace were, certainly, _non_-Hellenic; so much so, that it
is only by first peopling them with Pelasgi, and then making the Pelasgi
what may be called Hellenoeid--or Greek-like--that the semblance of any
close ethnological affinity with the true and undoubted Greeks of the
Homeric confederacy can be obtained.
If we leave the continent and turn to the islands, the greater part of
the Cyclades and Sporades are in the same predicament with Acarnania. In
the “Catalogue of the Ships,” Crete, Rhodes, Syme, Carpathus, Cos,
Nisuros, and the Calydnian Islands are alone named.
Such are the reasons for believing that the true and undoubted Hellenic
area, was, at the time of the Homeric poems, quite small enough to have
received the whole of its population from some other country, and that
by means of boats and ships.
The two elements of the Hellenic population in its simplest form,
are--1. The native; 2. The Italian; either of which may have been more
or less mixed; though the proof of it is impracticable, and the analysis
out of the question.
One of the tribes of the ancient Skipetar area was the Hylleis; and one
of the Doric heroes was Hyllus. I connect these names, the latter being
the eponymus to the former. When the Dorians conquer Peloponnesus,
Hyllus assists them. This suggests the likelihood of those immigrants
whose first settlements were on the northern side of the Saronic Gulf,
and who from thence effected conquests southwards and elsewhere, having
done so in alliance with certain members of the Illyrian, Epirote, or
Skipetar stock. If so, the Dorian conquests were only partially
Hellenic, so that there is, at least, an element of intermixture here.
Others are referable to the eastern coast. Asia Minor, Egypt, and
Phœnicia all contributed to mix the Hellenic blood. In respect to
Asia Minor we may relegate the account of the descent of Pelops on
Peloponnesus to the region of unsatisfactory traditions, and still have
a large amount of facts in favour of the infusion of Eastern blood from
this quarter being considerable. These lie in the character of the
islanders of the Ægean. Whatever else they may have been, they were
partially Carian on one side, and partially Greek on the other.
The claims of Egypt to have contributed to the Greek stock have been
closely criticized by Colonel Mure. His broad position, that the
introduction of foreign settlers is generally followed by visible and
definite influences on the language, is carried to, perhaps, an undue
extent, since, to take an example from our own history, the effect of
the Danes in England is by no means commensurate with their real
importance as invaders. Or, perhaps, his views are limited to the
criticism of a nation’s literature; in which case a foreign settlement,
which gave nothing new to the speech of the people, to their arts, to
their records, or to their mythology, would, to the historian of its
literature, be no foreign settlement at all. The ethnologist is, to a
certain degree, in the same position; but only to a certain degree. At
any rate, however, the fact of an Egyptian element in the early Hellenic
population is an important point in the ancient commerce of the
Mediterranean, even if it be nothing more.
I admit the likelihood sagaciously suggested by Colonel Mure, of the
parts between Syria and Egypt being, in reality, Semitic[11] rather than
Egyptian, yet passing for Egyptian in the eyes of a Greek; so that much
which is really Phœnician, or Jewish, may have been considered as
Coptic. Nevertheless, a few fragmentary facts seem to indicate a true
introduction of Egyptian ideas and blood.
_a._ The name of the city _Thebæ_, common to both Greece and Egypt, is
one of these.
_b._ The reproach cast in the teeth of Achilles in respect to
Penthesilea by Thersites, which can only be alluded to here, but which
is explained in Herodotus[12] by a reference to Egyptian manners is
another.
_c._ The word _Barbaros_, which the evidence of Herodotus, combined with
the fact of the native name of the Africans immediately to the south of
Egypt being _Berber_ at the present moment, induces me to consider it
as an absolute Egyptian word.
_d._ The word _Africa_ is easily explained by supposing that the
Egyptians took it from the _Afer_ nations of Abyssinia, and so gave it
the Greeks, but it is not explicable by deducing it from a Semitic
source.
_e._ The names _Iolchos_ and _Colchis_.--How comes Jason, in sailing
from a part of Thessaly named _Iolchos_, to reach a part of Asia with a
name all but identical? or, changing the expression, how comes the
Colchos of the Black Sea which Jason visits, to have had a name so like
that of the birthplace of the hero who visits it? These things, however
little they may be set down to the chapter of accidents, are rarely
accidental. Yet they cannot be connected with each other. The evidence,
however, of Herodotus to the existence of Egyptian customs in Colchis
(evidence which, although it will not prove the identity of the Georgian
stock with the Egyptian, suggests the idea of a partial settlement)
supplies an explanation. Both _Colchos_ and _Iolchos_ may have been
Egyptian.
Farther remarks upon the assumption that the Phœnicians only (and not
the Egyptians) were a maritime people, will occur in the ethnology of
Crete.
The influences from Syria and Palestine were either Phœnician or
Jewish, and by no means exclusively Phœnician. The selling of the
sons and daughters of Judah into captivity beyond the sea, is a fact
attested by Isaiah. Neither do I think that the eponymus of the Argive
_Danai_ was other than that of the Israelite tribe of Dan; only we are
so used to confine ourselves to the soil of Palestine in our
consideration of the history of the Israelites, that we treat them as if
they were _adscripti glebœ_, and ignore the share they may have taken
in the ordinary history of the world. Like priests of great sanctity,
they are known in the holy places only--yet the seaports between Tyre
and Ascalon, of Dan, Ephraim, and Asher, must have followed the history
of seaports in general, and not have stood on the coast for nothing.
What a light would be thrown on the origin of the name _Pelop_-o-nesus,
and the history of the _Pelop_-id family, if a _bonâ fide_ nation of
_Pelopes_, with unequivocal affinities, and cotemporary annals, had
existed on the coast of Asia! Who would have hesitated to connect the
two? Yet with the Danai and the tribe of Dan this is the case, and no
one connects them.
In these remarks I by no means say that the resemblance is not
accidental; although my opinion is against it being so. I only say that
a conclusion which would have been suggested if the tribe of Dan had
been Gentiles has been neglected because they were Jews.
That the alphabet and the weights and measures of Greece are
Phœnician is likely enough; indeed, from the extent to which the
habit of circumcision was strange to the Hellenes, the evidence is in
favour of the coasts of Phœnicia, and the Philistine country having
supplied a larger immigration than those of the Holy Land. In respect to
the infusion itself of Semitic blood, whatever may have been the details
of its origin, it was considerable; and has generally been admitted to
have been so.
The absolute admixture of Thracian and Phrygian blood on the soil of
Hellas, anterior to the Macedonian conquest, is a complex question.
If the Pelasgi belonged to either of these families, it was, of course,
exceedingly great. But the ethnological position of the Pelasgi has yet
to be considered. Even if they did not, an important question still
stands over; since the influence of the Thracian bards and the Phrygian
musicians, however much it has been either wholly or partially doubted
by late writers, was admitted by the ancient Greeks themselves. Then
there is the Trojan war, an event, which, however fabulous in its
details, has some basis in fact. Lastly, there is the belief at the
beginning of the historical period of the existence of Thracians in
Bœotia. All, however, upon these points that is indicated at present
is the caution against excluding Thracian blood from Hellas on the mere
strength of its barbaric character. It is also added that, until the
ethnology of Thrace has been dealt with, the evidence in favour of the
Italian origin of the Greek language is incomplete.
The extent of the Hellenic area at the date of the Homeric “Catalogue of
Ships,” has been given. The majority of the Ægean islands were, then,
other than Greek. On the coasts, however, of Asia Minor portions of what
was afterwards Ionia had been colonized. Teos, for instance, and Smyrna
are mentioned by name; on the other hand, the division of the colonized
portions into _Æolia_, _Ionia_, and _Doris_ is unnoticed--probably it
was unknown and non-existent. There are Dorians, however, in Crete. The
Hellenes are simply a population of Thessaly, the Pelasgi allied to the
Trojans, and circumscribed in area. Danaoi, Argeoi, and Achaioi are the
nearest approaches to an equivalent to the subsequent term _Hellenes_.
From the Homeric age until the approach of the Persian war, our notices
of the Hellenes are so nearly limited to the Greeks of Asia, that the
state of Thessaly, Bœotia, Attica, and the Peloponnesus--European and
Continental Greece--is obscure; Athens, however, and Sparta are the
parts that then command notice; not Miletus, Smyrna, or Lesbos.
_Hellas_, too, as a collective name, has been developed. On the coast of
Asia there is an Æolis, a Doris, and an Ionia, all of which the Hellenes
look upon as settlements from corresponding parts of Greece, and there
is division of the Hellenes themselves, of considerable political
importance, into two classes--the Dorian and Ionian. These differences
between their own age and the Homeric, the great historians of the
Golden Age of Greek literature explained as they best could. Are we
bound to admit their explanation? Not for the Pelasgi, because we can
get no definite doctrine at all concerning them. Nor yet, in my mind,
for the Doric, Æolic, and Ionic migrations in their details. I cannot
believe that the Ionic dialect ever came out of Greece; holding, that
nothing but a most undue deference to authority and opinion can deduce
it directly from any older form of the Attic. And this is but one
objection out of many. Indeed I submit to the reader’s consideration the
doctrine that the differences expressed by the terms in question, are
best explained and accounted for by supposing, either--
1. A difference between the original Italian populations; or--
2. A difference in the elements which were supplied in Greece itself.
Thus--admixture and alliance with the original population of Thessaly
and South Macedon, rather than with that of Epirus may have determined
the Æolian character; admixture and alliance with the South Epirotes
rather than the Thessalians, the Doric; Semitic elements the Ionic. In
the first and last instances, there may also have been a different
starting-point from Italy; the Ionians being derived from the coast that
gave its name to the Ionian Sea, the Æolians from the district to which
Æolus was the eponymus.
That such results as these, wearing, perhaps, the garb of paradoxes, are
in strong contrast to the recognized doctrines of the best Greek
historians is undoubted. No reader, however, should dismiss them until
he has satisfied himself that he has discussed the question
ethnologically as well as historically; until he has clearly seen the
extent whereto the reasoning which the palæontological geologist applies
to the antiquities of the earth’s crust (reasoning wholly independent of
historical testimony) is applicable to the archæology of the human
species also; and (lastly and most especially) until having fully
appreciated the necessity of making the geographical and philological
connections of the Latin and Greek languages coincide, he has
experienced the difficulty of doing so in the face of the phenomena
presented by the present distribution of the Skipetar, Dalmatian,
Croatian, and other interjacent populations.
There is, then, a Greek language, a Greek literature, a Greek influence
in literature; all beyond doubt. But there is no equally undoubted Greek
stock. As far as there is such an entity, the speech is in Hellas, and
the blood in Italy.
Up to a certain time the Hellenic influence has a northern direction,
and acts upon certain populations originally barbarous, so as
imperfectly to Hellenize them. Such is the case with Ætolia and Macedon.
Afterwards, however, the direction of these influences changes, and
Ætolia and Macedon contribute to dis-Hellenize (if so hybrid a word may
be allowed) Greece. Before they do this, however, they have been taken
out of the category of barbarism; just as would be the case if
Anglo-Saxon England were reconquered by the half-Anglicized Ireland of
the nineteenth century, and just as would _not_ have been the case had
it been conquered by the Ireland of Brian Ború. Rome, too, respected the
land that she had reduced; so that the physical history of Greece
remains but slightly altered until the period of the Gothic, Hun, and
Slavonic invasions. And even Alaric but ravaged the soil and destroyed
life. We nowhere find proofs of any introduction of Gothic blood. Nor
yet of Hun. It is the Slavonic stock that has given Greece its greatest
foreign element.
Why is it that when we compare a map of Modern with one of Ancient
Greece, such a small proportion of the old classical names, either
modified or unmodified in form, can be found? Such is, undoubtedly, the
case. Yet subject to Turkey as Greece was until the present century, the
majority of the new names is not Turkish. On the contrary, they are
chiefly Slavonic. The language of the later Byzantine writers explains
this.[13]
As early as the last quarter of the sixth century (A.D. 582), the
movements set in towards Greece; Thrace and Macedon being overrun by
Slavonians. The details here, however, are obscure, and there is an
occasional confusion of the Slaves with the Avars. The latter nation,
however, seems to have made no notable settlement in Southern Greece at
least. In the latter half of the seventh century, Thessaly, Epirus,
several of the islands, and parts of Asia Minor were overrun. In the
ninth, Macedon is called Slavonia (Σκλαβἱνια). In the
eleventh, Athens is sacked, and the inhabitants driven to take refuge in
the isle of Salamis. Under Constantine Porphyrogeneta, the presence of
an Hellenic population is an exception. “In Macedon,” he writes, “the
Scythians dwell, instead of the Macedonians.” Again, “the whole country
is Slavonized.”
But the most remarkable passage is the following, which shows that a
Slavonic population is so far the rule that where an approach to the
ancient population is found it is dealt with as a remarkable phenomenon;
and that by a Greek writer:--“It must be known that the inhabitants of
the settlement (κἁστρον) Maina, are not of the race of the
aforesaid Slaves, but of the old Romans, and even till the present time,
they are called by their neighbours _Hellenes_, from having been
originally Pagans and idolatrers like the old Hellenes.”--De Adm. Imp.
I. 50.
Latin writers, equally with the Greek, considered Greece to be
Slavonic:--“Inde (_i.e._, Sicilia) navigantes venerunt ultra mare Adrium
ad urbem _Manafasiam_ in Sclavinica terra.”--From a Journal of St.
Willibald, the writer of which, by Manafasia, means Napoli di _Malvasia_
in the Morea.
More than this. The details of some of these Slavonic populations are
given; so that we know that there were Ezeritæ and Milengi in the
Morea, with Dragovitæ, Sagudatæ, Velegezetæ, Verzetæ, and others in
Northern Greece.
In diminished numbers, the representatives of the old Laconians exist at
the present time. A.D. 1573, they had fourteen, they have now but three,
villages--Prasto, or the ancient Prasiæ, Kastanitza, and Silina. With
the exception of their dialect, the Romaic of modern Hellas is said to
be spoken with considerable uniformity over the whole of Greece.
Without investigating the difficult question as to the proportion of
Slavonic elements, it may fairly be said that Ancient Greece is the area
of a greatly, and Modern Greece that of an inordinately, mixed stock. To
this mixture, Italians, Albanians, and other populations of modern
Europe have added.
CHAPTER VI.
RUSSIAN POPULATIONS, SARMATIAN AND TURANIAN.--SAMOEIDS
TURANIAN.--UGRIANS.--LAPPS.--KWAINS.--ESTHONIANS.--LIEFS.
--PERMIANS.--SIRANIANS.--VOTIAKS.--TSHEREMISS, TSHUVATSH,
MORDUIN.--LITHUANIANS.--MALORUSSIANS AND MUSCOVITES.--THEIR
RECENT INTRODUCTION.--THE SKOLOTI.--EARLY DISPLACEMENTS.--UGRIAN
GLOSSES.--INDIAN AFFINITIES OF THE LITHUANIC--RUSSIAN POLAND.--ANALYTICAL
VIEW OF THE PRESENT POPULATIONS OF RUSSIA.--ARKHANGEL.--FINLAND.
--ESTHONIA.--LIVONIA.--PERM.--SIMBIRSK, PENZA.--LITHUANIA.--VOLHYNIA.
--KHARKHOV.--KOSAKS.--KHERSON.--TAURIDA.
Without asking too minutely what are the real boundaries of Europe on
its eastern side, we shall find it convenient to carry them as far as
the Volga and the Ural Mountains; by doing which we include the
Government of the Don Kosaks, Astrakan, Orenburg, Perm, Vologda, and the
whole of Arkhangel. This is being inordinately liberal; but it is as
well to be so, because three divisions of the population of European
Russia are common to the two continents; and hence the history of more
than one of the areas under consideration will be incomplete unless we
trace its occupants to their original home on the other side of the Ural
Mountains. One of these areas is the important country of Hungary; so
far, at least, as it is possessed by the Asiatic Majiars.
The great primary divisions of the human species to which the population
of European Russia is referable, are only two in number; but then each
of them is a class of great extent and generality; falling into
divisions and subdivisions. These are the Sarmatian and the Turanian;
_Sarmatian_ meaning the Slavonian and Lithuanian families collectively,
and _Turanian_ the Ugrian and Turk. A few months ago a third class would
have been requisite, the Samoeid; in order to include the occupants of
the Valley of the Lower Petshora and the coasts of the Arctic Sea, in
the eastern parts of the government of Arkhangel. But it has been shown
by Gabelentz, from an analysis of the Samoeid language that it belongs
to the same class with the Fin, Lapp, Permian, Siranian, Votiak, and
other Ugrian tongues.
The present distribution of the Ugrian populations is not only a point
of importance for its own sake, but is an indispensable preliminary for
the inquiry into the earlier ethnology of Russia.
The Lapp branch of the Ugrian stock is common to Russia and Scandinavia,
so that it will be noticed again when Norway and Sweden come under
consideration. It is chiefly in their dialect and creed that the two
divisions differ; the imperfect Christianity of the Russian Lapps being
that of the Greek Church, and their speech, although, I believe,
intelligible to a Norwegian Lapp, being stamped with several well-marked
peculiarities. It is the structure of their language that shows them to
belong to the same stock as the Kwains of Finland, the difference of
their complexion and stature being considerable; for the Lapp is
dark-haired, dark-eyed, swarthy-skinned, under-sized, and weak-built, as
is the Samoeid also. The Lapp chiefly occupies the country to the west,
the Samoeid that to the east of the White Sea.
Finland is the country of a people whom it is best to call Kwains; since
Kwain is the native name, and Fin is a term which, from being often
applied to the Lapps of Finmark, creates confusion. If this designation
be too strange, _Finlander_ should be strictly adhered to. Viborg and
Olonetz are parts of the Kwain area, with but little variation on the
part of their occupants. St. Petersburg was a part of Finland until the
time of Peter the Great, and Esthonia is Ugrian at the present time. No
new inhabitants of Esthonia, but, on the contrary, its oldest occupants,
the Rahwas, closely allied to the proper Finlanders of Finland, form
the third section of the great Ugrian stock. _Liv_onia, or _Lief_-land,
takes its name from an Ugrian tribe, the _Liefs_, a tribe which from
being pressed upon by the Lithuanians of Courland, is nearly extinct as
a separate substantive population.
In Courland the most western Ugrians came in contact with the
Lithuanians; not, as is reasonably believed, exactly on the banks of the
Dwina, but within the Province; in other words, the ancient Ugrians of
these parts extended over the whole of Livonia, and also a little beyond
it. Courland, however, is, upon the whole, essentially a Lithuanic area.
In Vologda and Perm, two closely allied members of a fresh branch of
Ugrians present themselves, the Siranians and the Permians; the latter
greatly reduced and Russianized. Perm is bounded by the Ural Mountains,
along the ridge of which are the Voguls, and, east of the Voguls, the
Ostiaks of the Obi. But as these belong to Asia, it is sufficient to say
that they are Ugrian. The Votiaks take their name from the river Viatka,
as does the government they inhabit.
Kazan, Novgorod, Simbirsk, and Saratov, like Viatka and Perm, are truly
Ugrian areas, though the intrusion of both Turk and Russian elements has
left the original populations in a fragmentary state. They are
represented, however, by the Tsheremiss, the Tshuvatsh and the Morduin;
the Tshuvatsh being a problematical population from the extent to which
their language presents a mixture of Turk elements, and the Morduins
falling into three divisions--the Mokshad, the Ersad, and the Karatai.
The absolute and undoubted area, then, of the Ugrians of Russia, as it
exists at the present moment, notwithstanding encroachments from both
the Turks of the east, and the Russians of the south and west, reaches
as far south as the government of Saratov.
The present distribution of the Lithuanian populations, is second only
in importance to that of the Ugrians. Livonia is the most convenient
starting-point. Here it is spoken at present; though not aboriginal to
the province. The Polish, German, and Russian languages have encroached
on the Lithuanian, the Lithuanian on the Ugrian. It is the Lett branch
of the Lithuanian which is spoken by the Letts of Livonia (Liefland)
_but not by the Liefs_. The same is the case in Courland. East Prussia
lies beyond the Russian empire, but it is not unnecessary to state that,
as late as the sixteenth century, a Lithuanian tongue was spoken there.
Vilna, Grodno, and Vitepsk are the proper Lithuanian provinces. There,
the original proper Lithuanic tongue still survives; uncultivated, and
day by day suffering from the encroachment of the Russian, but, withal,
in the eyes of the ethnologist, the most important language in Europe.
The _Tartar_ provinces come next, or, to speak more correctly, the
_Turk_. _Tartar_, however, is the usual term, and as _Tartary_ is the
recognised name of the country to the east of the Caspian, it is not
likely to be got rid of; nor yet to be changed into the more correct
form _Tahtah_. The stock, however, is that to which the Ottoman Turks of
Turkey, along with numerous other powerful and important populations,
belong. Kasan, Oremberg, and Astrakhan are the chief Turk provinces. A
portion, too, of New Russia is Turk. The date of their introduction is
the thirteenth century; the empire to which they belonged being that of
the successors of Zengis Khan.
The peculiarities of the distribution of the Turks of Russia is
explained by their history. Of Southern Russia, as well as of the
south-eastern provinces, they were once the exclusive masters. This
makes the Russian population of Kherson, Ekaterinoslav, the Don Kosak
country, and the greater part of Taurida, of recent origin; indeed, it
is not only recent but mixed, and it is called _New_ Russian.
Podolia, Kiev, Pultava, Kharkhov, are what is called Malorussian, or
_Little_ Russian. The dialect differs notably from that of the
Muscovite of the central governments, and has its affinities in a
different direction, since it very closely resembles the Russniak of
Gallicia. And in Gallicia it probably originated. At the same time the
three dialects, the Russniak, the Maloruss, and the Muscovite (or Great
Russian) are mutually intelligible. Between these two branches of the
Russian family a strong national antipathy exists.
In Volhynia the dialect is the White Russian, and so it is in those
parts of Lithuania where the Lithuanian is out of use.
The true and proper Russian of Great Russia, or Muscovy, the language of
the capitals, and the language which the conquests of Russia have
extended over all Northern Asia, and even into North-western America,
circumscribed, as it has been shown to be, by the languages and dialects
which have just been enumerated, is still spoken over a vast area--over
all the central provinces of Russia, as well as on the Baltic and the
Euxine, at St. Petersburg and at Odessa. It is generally, too, the
language of the towns. But, for a language of so vast an area, it falls
into a remarkably small number of dialects. In Olonetz it is mixed with
the Fin, since the Fin is the original language of that government; and,
in Vladimir, the Suzdal dialect exhibits certain peculiarities; but,
with these, and, perhaps, a few other exceptions, the uniformity is
complete.
This is _primâ facie_ evidence of its introduction being recent; a fact
which the whole history of ancient Russia confirms; indeed, it is highly
probable that no truly Slavonic nation (not even the Malorussians)
occupied any portion of their present possessions anterior to the fourth
century of the Christian era. If so, how was the area first filled? By
the Lithuanians and the Ugrians; by the Lithuanians extending from the
west eastwards, and by the Ugrians extending from the east westwards. By
this hypothesis the two populations met in some of the central
provinces, though it is difficult to fix the absolute points of contact.
Nor were the Slavonians even the first invaders who disturbed this
distribution; since Turk populations _different from and earlier than
the Turks of the thirteenth century_ were settled in Southern Russia in
the fifth century B.C., _i.e._, at the very beginning of the historical
period. Neither do I press the absolute exclusion of stocks other than
the Lithuanian and the Ugrian so strongly as to deny the likelihood of
the aborigines of the Crimea and some of the neighbouring districts
having been members of the same stock as the Circassians and the other
tribes of Caucasus. Little, however, depends on this.
Upon the early exclusion of the Slavonians a great deal depends; a great
deal affecting not only the ethnology of Russia itself, but that of the
whole area, real or imaginary, of the Slavonic stock; that of the parts
west of the Elbe, that of Bohemia and Dalmatia, that of
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