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:
“It is in the lands of Thessaly and Epirus that we first dimly descry the Greeks busy at the task for which destiny had chosen them, of creating and shaping the thought and civilisation of Europe. The oak wood of Dodona in Epirus is the earliest sanctuary, whereof we have any knowledge, of their supreme god, Zeus, the dweller of the sky. Thessaly has associations which still appeal intimately to men of European birth. The first Greek settlers in Thessaly were the Achæans; and in the plain of Argos, and in the mountains which gird it about, they fashioned legends which were to sink deeply into the imagination of Europe. We know that when the Greek conquerors came down to the coast of the Ægean they found a material civilisation more advanced than their own; and it was so chanced that we know more of this civilisation than we know of the conquerors before they came under its influence.
“In Greece as in the other two great peninsulas of the Mediterranean, we find, before the invader of Aryan speech entered in and took possession, a white folk not speaking an Aryan tongue. Corresponding to the Iberians in Spain and Gaul, to the Ligurians in Italy, we find in Greece a race which was also spread over the islands of the Ægean and along the coast of Asia Minor. The men of this primeval race gave to many a hill and rock the name which was to abide with it forever. Corinth and Tiryns, Parnassus and Olympus, Arne and Larissa, are names which the Greeks received from the peoples whom they dispossessed. But this Ægean race, as we may call it for want of a common name, had developed, before the coming of the Greek, a civilisation of which we have only very lately come to know. This civilisation went hand in hand with an active trade, which in the third millennium spread its influence far beyond the borders of the Ægean, as far at least as the Danube and the Nile, and received in return gifts from all quarters of the world. The Ægean peoples therefore plied a busy trade by sea, and their maritime intercourse with the African continent can be traced back to even earlier times, since at the very beginning of Egyptian history we find in Egypt obsidian, which can have come only from the Ægean isles. The most notable remains of this civilisation have been found at Troy, in the little island of Amorgos, and in the great island of Crete.
“The conquest of the Greek peninsula by the Greeks lies a long way behind recorded history, and the Greeks themselves, when they began to reflect on their own past, had completely forgotten what their remote ancestors had done ages and ages before.
“The invaders spoke an Aryan speech, but it does not follow that they all came of Aryan stock. There was, indeed, an Aryan element among them, and some of them were descendants of men of Aryan race who had originally taught them their language and brought them some Aryan institutions and Aryan deities. But the infusion of the Aryan blood was probably small; and in describing the Greeks, as well as any other of the races who speak sister tongues, we must be careful to call them men of Aryan speech, and not men of Aryan stock.c”
Perhaps the very latest view of sterling authority is that of Professor William Ridgeway,d who, after marshalling a vast amount of argument and induction based upon the extant and newly discovered relics of early Grecian civilisations, sums up his theories briefly and definitely. He accepts the existence of a “Pelasgian” race, which many have scouted, and credits it with the art-work and commerce revealed at Mycenæ and elsewhere and called “Mycenæan.” This was a dark-skinned (or melanochroöus) race which “had dwelt in Greece from a remote antiquity and had at all times, in spite of conquests, remained a chief element in the population of all Greece, whilst in Arcadia and Attica it had never been subjugated.” The Mycenæan civilisation had its origin, he believes, in the mainland of Greece and spread thence outwards to the isles of the Ægean, Crete, Egypt, and north to the Euxine. This Mycenæan era differs widely from the Homeric,—as in the treatment of the dead, and in the use of metals,—and preceded the Homeric by a great distance, the Mycenæan period belonging to the Bronze Age, the Homeric to the Iron Age.
The Homeric people were not melanochroöus, but xanthochroöus (fair and blond), and were evidently a conquering race—the Achæans. These Achæans, according to Greek tradition, came from Epirus, and indeed a study of the relics and “the culture of the early Iron Age of Bosnia, Carniola, Styria, Salzburg, and upper Italy revealed armour, weapons, and ornaments exactly corresponding to those described in Homer. Moreover we found that a fair-haired race greater in stature than the melanochroöus Ægean people had there been domiciled for long ages, and that fresh bodies of tall, fair-haired people from the shores of the northern ocean continually through the ages had kept pressing down into the southern peninsulas. From this it followed that the Achæans of Homer were one of these bodies of Celts, who had made their way down into Greece and had become masters of the indigenous race.”
The history of the round shield, the use of buckles and brooches, the custom of cremating the dead, and the distribution of iron in Europe, Asia, and Africa, seem to Professor Ridgeway to point still more sharply to a theory that these features of Greek civilisation previously existed in central Europe and were brought thence into Greece. A study of the dialect in which the Homeric poems are written indicates that the language and metre belonged to the earlier race, the Pelasgians, whom the Achæans conquered. The earliest Greeks spoke an Aryan or Indo-Germanic language of which the Arcadian dialect was the purest remnant, since the Achæans and Dorians never conquered Arcadia. The introduction of labialism into the Greek, Ridgeway believes to be a proof of the Celtic origin of the invaders who accepted, as conquerors usually do, the language of the conquered and yet modified it. “Labialism” is the changing of a hard consonant as “k” into a lip-consonant as “p”—as the older Greek word for horse was “hikkos,” which became “hippos.” The result, then, of Ridgeway’s erudite research is his belief that “the Achæans were a Celtic tribe who made their way into Greece,” and for this theory he asserts that “archæology, tradition, and language are all in harmony.”
The original source of this migration,—for it was rather migration than an invasion,—seems to have been in the northwest of the Balkan peninsula. Some extraordinary pressure must have been brought to bear on the Greeks by the Illyrians who may themselves have been forced out of their own homes by some unrecorded power. At the same time the people then living in Macedonia and Thrace were dispossessed and shoved into Phrygia and the regions of Troy in Asia Minor. The possession of Greece by the Greeks was doubtless very gradual and the Peloponnesus was the last to be visited, possibly by boat across the Corinthian Gulf. In some places the new-comers were doubtless compelled to fight, elsewhere they drifted in almost unnoticed and gradually asserted a sway. The new-comers imposed their speech eventually on the older people, but as usual they must have been themselves largely influenced by the older civilisation in the matter of customs and conditions.a