The Historians' History of the World 03

The language of the ancient Grecian race (which, together with its religion, forms the most ancient record of its history) must, if we may judge from the varieties of dialect and from a comparison with the Latin language, have been very perfect in its structure, and rich and expressive in its flexions and formations; though much of this was polished off by the Greeks of later ages: in early times, distinctness and precision in marking the primitive words and the inflections being more attended to than facility of utterance. Wherever the ancient forms had been preserved, they sounded foreign and uncouth to more modern ears; and the language of later times was greatly softened, in comparison with the Latin. But the peculiarities of the pure Doric dialect are (wherever they were not owing to a faithful preservation of archaic forms) actual deviations from the original dialect, and consequently they do not occur in Latin; they bear a northern character. The use of the article, which did not exist in the Latin language or in that of epic poetry, can be ascribed to no other cause than to immigrations of new tribes, and especially to that of the Dorians. Its introduction must, nearly as in the Roman languages, be considered as the sign of a great revolution. The peculiarities of the Doric dialect must have existed before the period of the migrations; since thus only can it be explained how peculiar forms of the Doric dialect were common to Crete, Argos, and Sparta: the same is also true of the dialects which are generally considered as subdivisions of the Æolic; the only reason for the resemblance of the language of Lesbos to that of Bœotia being, that Bœotians migrated at that period to Lesbos. The peculiarities of the Ionic dialect may, on the other hand, be viewed in great part as deviations caused by the genial climate of Asia; for the language of the Attic race, to which the latter were most nearly related, could hardly have differed so widely from that of the colonies of Athens, if the latter had not been greatly changed.b

THE MIGRATION—THE VIEW OF CURTIUS

[ca. 1100 B.C.]

It is with the advance of the Dorians that the power of the mountain peoples makes its appearance from the north to take its share in the history of nations. For centuries they had lagged behind the coast and maritime races, but now they stepped in with all the greater impress of sheer natural force, and all that was transformed and reformed as a consequence of their conquering march, had a durability which lasted throughout the whole period of Greek history. This is the reason that in contradistinction to the “Heroic Age” ancient historians begin the historical period with the first deeds of the Dorians.

But, for all that, the information concerning these deeds is none the less scanty. On the contrary: as this epoch approaches, the old sources dry up, and new ones are not opened. Homer knows nothing of the march of the Heraclidæ [i.e., descendants of Heracles or Hercules]. The Achæan emigrants lived entirely in the memory of past days, and cherished it beyond the sea in the faithful memorials of song. For those who remained behind, who had to submit themselves to a strange and powerful rule, it was no time for poetry. The Dorians themselves have always been sparing in the matter of tradition; it was not their way to use many words about what they had done; they had not the soaring enthusiasm of the Achæan race, and still less were they capable of spinning out their experiences at a pleasing length, in the fashion of the Ionians. Their inclination and ability were directed to practical existence, to the fulfilment of definite tasks, to earnest occupations.

Thus, then, the great incidents of the Dorian emigration were left to chance tradition, of which all but a few faint traces have been lost, and this is why our whole information on the conquest of the peninsula is as poor in names as in facts. For it was only at a later date, when the national epos itself had long died out, that an attempt was made to recover the beginnings of Peloponnesian history.

But these later poets could no longer find any fresh and living fountain of tradition; nor is theirs that pure and unrestrained delight in the images of the olden time, which constitutes the very breath of life in the Homeric poem; but there is a conscious effort to fill out the gaps in tradition, and to join the torn threads connecting the Achæan and the Dorian period. They sought to unify the legends of various places, to restore the missing links, to reconcile contradictions; and thus arose a history of the march of the Heraclidæ, in which things that had come about gradually and in the course of centuries, were related together with dogmatic brevity.