The Historians' History of the World 03

After Pelasgus and his sons, Arcas, as ancestor of the Arcadians, stands at the beginning of a new era in the prehistoric life of the country. But Arcadians were to be found in Phrygia and Bithynia as well as in Crete and Cyprus, and the fact that colonists from the islands and shores of the eastern sea ascended into the highlands of the Peloponnesus that they might settle there in the beautiful valleys, is manifested by many tokens. The Cretan myths about Zeus are repeated in the closest manner of the Arcadian Lycæum; Tegea and Gortys are Cretan as well as Arcadian towns, with identical forms of worship, ancient legends connect Tegea and Paphos and the Cyprian dialect, which has only very recently been learnt from the native monuments, shows a great likeness to the Arcadian. Arcadians were known as navigators both in the western and in the eastern sea, and Nauplius, the hero of the oldest Peloponnesian seaport town appears as the servant of the Tegeatic kings, to whose house Argonauts like Ancæus also belong.

There are remains of old traditions, which show that even the interior of the Peloponnesus was not so remote or isolated as is commonly supposed; that here too there were immigrations and that in consequence in the rural districts, and particularly in the fruitful ravines of the eastern side, a series of towns grew up, which, on account of the natural barriers of their frontiers, early formed isolated city domains; such as those of Pheneus, Stynphalus, Orchomenus, Cleitor and afterwards the towns of Mantinea, Alea, Caphyæ, and Gortys. In the southwest portion of Arcadia, in the forest range of Lycæum, and in the valley of the Alpheus were also to be found ancient fortress towns, such as Lycosura; but these fortresses never became political centres of the districts. The mass of the people remained scattered and were only connected with the community by very slight bonds.

Thus the whole of Arcadia consisted of a numerous group of municipal and rural cantons. It was only the former which could attain historical importance, and among them especially Tegea, which lying as it did in the most fertile part of the great Arcadian plateau, must from the earliest times have assumed something of the position of a capital city. Thus it was a Tegeatic king, Echemus, the “steadfast,” who is said to have prevented the Dorians from entering the peninsula. Yet the Tegeatæ never succeeded in giving a unity to the whole island. Its natural conformation was too multi-form, too diversified, and too much cut up by high mountain ridges into numerous and sharply defined portions for it to be able to attain to a common territorial history. It was only certain forms of worship, with which customs and institutions were bound up, that were universal among the whole Arcadian people. These were, in the north country the worship of Artemis Hymnia, and in the south that of Zeus Lycæus, on the Lycæum, whose summit had been honoured as the holy mountain of Arcadia from primeval Pelasgian times.

The country was in this condition when the Pelopidæ founded their states; and so it still remained when the Dorians invaded the peninsula. A wild, impracticable mountain country, thickly populated by a sturdy people, Arcadia offered little prospect of easy success to races in search of territory, and could not detain them from their attempts on the river plains of the southern and western districts. According to the legend they were granted a free passage through the Arcadian fields. Nothing was changed except that the Arcadians were pushed farther and farther back from the sea, and therefore driven farther and farther from the advance Hellenic civilisation.

If we take a glance at the peninsula as a whole, and the political government which, in consequence of the immigration, it acquired for all time, we shall find, first, the interior persisting in its former condition unshaken, secondly, three districts, Lacedæmon, Messenia, and Argos, which had undergone a thorough metamorphosis directly due to the immigrating races; and finally the two strips of land along the north and west coasts, which had been left untouched by the Dorians, but in part were resettled by the ancient tribes whom the Dorians displaced, as was the case with Triphylia and Achæa, and in part transformed by arrivals of another kind, as happened at Elis.

Thus complicated were the results which followed the Dorian migration. They show sufficiently how little we have here to do with a transformation effected at one blow, like the result of a fortunate campaign. After the races had long wandered up and down in a varying series of territorial disputes and mutual agreements, the fate of the peninsula was gradually decided. Only when men had forgotten the tedious period of unrest and ferment, which memory can adorn with no incidents, could the reconstitution of the peninsula be regarded as a sudden turn of events by which the Peloponnesus had become Dorian.