The Historians' History of the World 03

All this of course implies that the Greeks were one race in the narrow sense of the term, sprung in relatively recent time from a single stock. Such was undoubtedly the fact, and the division into Ionians, Dorians, and various lesser branches, on which the historian naturally lays much stress, must be understood always as implying only a minor and later differentiation. One will hear much of the various dialects of the different Greek states, but one must not forget that these dialects represent only minor variations of speech which as compared with the fundamental unity of the language as a whole might almost be disregarded. To be a Greek was to be born of Greek parents, to the use of the Greek language as a mother tongue; for the most part, following the national custom, it was to eschew every other language and to look out upon all peoples who spoke another tongue as “barbarians”—people of an alien birth and an alien genius.

But whence came this people of the parent stock whose descendants made up the historic Greek race? No one knows. The Greeks themselves hardly dared to ask the question, and we are utterly without data for answering it if asked. Their traditions implied a migration from some unknown land to Greece, since those traditions told of a non-Hellenic people who inhabited the land before them. Yet in contradiction of this idea the Greek mind clung always to autocthony. Like most other nations, and in far greater measure than perhaps any other, the Hellenes loved their home—almost worshipped it. To be a Greek and yet to have no association with the mountains and valleys and estuaries and islands of Greece seems a contradiction of terms. True, a major part of the population at a later day lived in distant colonies as widely separated as Asia Minor and Italy, but even here they thought of themselves only as more or less temporary invaders from the parent seat, and even kept up their association with it by considering all lands which Greeks colonised as a part of “Greater Greece.”

That the Greeks are of Aryan stock is of course made perfectly clear by their language. Some interesting conclusions as to the time when they branched from the parent stock are gained by philologists through observation of words which manifestly have the same root and meaning in the different Aryan languages. Thus, for example, the fact that such words as Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Son, Daughter, and the like, are clearly of the same root in Sanskrit and Greek as well as in Latin and the Germanic speech, shows that a certain relatively advanced stage of family life had been attained while the primitive Aryans still formed but a single race. Again the resemblance between the Greek and the Latin languages goes to show that the people whose descendants became Greeks and Romans clung together till a relatively late period, after the splitting up of the primitive race had begun. Yet on the other hand the differences between the Greek and the Latin prove that the two races using these languages had been separated long before either of them is ushered into history.

From which direction the parent stock of the Greeks came into the land that was to be their future abiding place has long been a moot point with scholars, and is yet undetermined. So long as the original cradle of the Aryans was held to be central Asia, it was the unavoidable conclusion that the Aryans of Europe, including the Greeks, had come originally from the East. But when the theory was introduced that the real cradle of the primitive Aryan was not Asia but northwestern Europe all certainty from a priori considerations vanished, for it seemed at least as plausible that the parent Greeks might have dropped aside from the main swarm on its eastern journey to invade Asia as that they should have oscillated back to Greece after that invasion had been established. And more recently the question is still further complicated by the “Mediterranean Race” theory, which includes the Greeks as descendants of a hypothetical stock whose cradle was neither Asia nor Europe, but equatorial Africa.a

Some of the latest accounts of Greek origin are stated by Professor Bury who says: