THE NAME
It is a singular anomaly that a people who habitually called themselves Hellenes should be known to all the world beside as Greeks. This name was derived from the Graians, a small and obscure group. The Romans, chancing to come first in contact with this tribe, gave the name Greek to the whole people. In the course of time it became so fixed in the usage of other nations that it could never be shaken off. Such a change of a proper name was very unusual in antiquity. The almost invariable custom was, when it became necessary to use a proper name from a foreign language, to transcribe it as literally as might be with only such minor changes as a difference in the genius of the language made necessary. Thus the Greeks in speaking of their Persian enemies pronounced and wrote such words as “Cyrus” and “Darius” in as close imitation as possible of the native pronunciation of those names, and the Egyptians in turn, in accepting the domination of the Macedonian Ptolemies, spelled and no doubt pronounced the names of their conquerors with as little alteration as was possible in a language which made scant use of vowels. It was indeed this fact of transliteration rather than translation of foreign proper names which, as we have seen, furnished the clew to the nineteenth century scholars in their investigations of the hieroglyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform writing of Asia. Had not the engraver of the Rosetta stone spelled the word Ptolemy closely as the Greeks spelled it, Dr. Young, perhaps, never would have found the key to the interpretation of the hieroglyphics. And had not the eighty or ninety proper names of the great inscription at Behistun been interpreted by the same signs in the three different forms of writing that make up that inscription, it may well be doubted whether we should even now have any clear knowledge of the cuneiform character of the Babylonians and Assyrians. Indeed, so universal was this custom of retaining proper names in their original form that the failure of the Romans to apply to the Greeks the name which they themselves employed seems very extraordinary indeed. The custom which they thus inaugurated, however, has not been without imitators in modern times, as witness the translation “Angleterre” by which the French designate England, and the even stranger use by the same nation of the word “Allemagne” to designate the land which its residents term “Deutschland” and which in English is spoken of as Germany.
Had the classical writings of Greece been more extensively read throughout Europe in the Middle Ages it is probable that the Roman name Greece would have been discarded in modern usage, and the name Hellas restored to its proper position. An effort to effect this change has indeed been made more recently by many classical scholars, and it is by no means unusual to meet the terms “Hellas” and “Hellenes” in modern books of almost every European language; but to make the substitution in the popular mind after the word Greece has been so closely linked with so wide a chain of associate ideas for so many generations would be utterly impossible, at least in our generation.
THE ORIGIN OF THE GREEKS
But whether known as Hellas or as Greece, the tiny peninsula designated by these names was inhabited by a people which by common consent was by far the most interesting of antiquity. It has been said that they constituted a race rather than a nation, for the most patent fact about them, to any one who gives even casual attention to their history, was that they lacked the political unity which lies at the foundation of true national existence. Yet the pride of race to a certain extent made up for this deficiency, and if the Greeks recognised no single ruler and were never bound together into a single state, they felt more keenly perhaps than any other nation that has lived at any other period of the world’s history—unless perhaps an exception be made of the modern Frenchman—the binding force of racial affinities and the full meaning of the old adage that blood is thicker than water.
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.