CHAPTER VI.

§ i. Dorians and Achæans one stock.—§ ii. Of Oriental, Aramitic origin. -§ iii. The Heracleids, Classic Apollo, and other particulars, usually assumed as Doric.- iv. Assumed Doric Colonies in Asia.— § v. Course of the Achæi-Dorians from Asia.-Doric connexion with Apollo, Hercules, and the Games.-§ vi. Recapitulation.

LACONIA.- i. THE Doric institutions and dynastic superiority in Greece, with our admitted ignorance of their original introduction to their territory, Laconia, suggest a great blank in history.

The last preceding sections having exhibited an irruption of professed, trained, and egregiously armed wanderers,— races under the impulse of dispersion, invited by the comparatively defenceless state of the invaded districts, and by the wealth there accumulated by settled industry, and the processes of art, of Asiatic invention or introduction; we have at once the chief conditions of the "return of the Heraclidæ," viz., the waste of barbarism reflected on the very resources of the barbarians, engendering a necessity of order by union of the others.

Society had nigh forgotten itself for an interval: order had become an innovation, and its promoters forgotten and misrepresented, before their efforts or effects had become realized in any palpable or practical form of civil or religious administration. The "Iliad" shows a light for our guidance, only to withdraw it, and leave us in utter darkness. At that era, we have in Greece Hellenes and Achaioi: in the next, Dorians and Athenians.

The dawn of history brings an Assyrian and Persian empire, or their effects, to the border of the Egean; the Persian attempts on Greece and Egypt follow at the next epoch. In these facts we have the shadow of a preceding reality, Asiatic art and power spreading westward, until checked, first by barbarians, next by a race strong in the principles of order, and full of the patriotism emanating from its happy results in their energy and appreciation of a home and independence. Still, as to Greece, "shadows possess it merely: " let us follow the apparent progress of Archaic civilization, going constantly and determinedly still further West.

Lombardy and its southern districts to the Tiber present us the traces of constructive art and of drainage on that great scale exhibited in the neighbourhood of Orchomenos, Tyryns, Mycenae, and Western Greece; and a style copied or set in Archaic works of Egypt and Lydia, or even found at Persepolis, and on the Tigris. The classic term, "Cyclopian," stamps the early era as a dark age. The south of Italy, Magna Græcia, with a later style of art, affords glimpses of a purer faith than that of the mythology that overlays whatever antecedents in Greece, and of principles and results of order in advance of that on the other side the Hadriatic. Of the early advance of civilization in these western latitudes, we have no positive evidence by traditions or written records; things have to tell their story, if inquirers, mature in the knowledge of antiquity, make out or trace connexion with an emigration from the eastward, the proofs are abrupt, fragmental, or as much belonging to fable as to fact, and of so many and so varied aspects, as to mislead and wreck, rather than bring home, our conclusions. The Tuscan literature has not come down to us. Still we have something in addition to the cities and cemeteries of Etruria, and some accounts of a Rome, as ancient as its ruin and resuscitation after its sack by the Gauls.

The straits of Messina and the Gulf of Tarentum had collected their respective orders of settlers, the former to be

identified by their early relations (see preceding section) with the Phocæans of Marseilles. Crotona, rich with the spoils of Sybaris, had metropolitan power, and being a foundation nearly contemporary with that of Rome, had reached the maturity of order, and realized a Constitution approved by Plato, and accepted subsequently as the best possible by other communities, at 500 B. C., when a luxurious climate, wealth, and arts of effeminacy, had done their worst upon the men of a place originally styled "the city of the healthy." The Pythagorean league, blending with a free representative, or democratic state, the aristocracy of merit or imputed merit, in an upper class or senate, was nearly or actually contemporary with the foundation of Crotona. At this early period, they had energetic and hostile neighbours of another race at the straits of Messina, yet they developed their resources and policy, and with other States formed a league to vie with that of Tuscany at the opposite extremity of Italy. At the decline of the Pythagorean league, 500 B.C., Lower Italy flourished under "The Laws of the Achæans" (Müll., D. iii. 9-16). This investiture of an ancient nationality on the putting off an elder title (Pythagorean), can only be explained as the revival of old rights, or of an ancient name, authority, and dynasty; or perhaps of resuming the old title, with much of the leaven of the superseded Constitution.

Crotona had an Achæan reputation (M. D., iii. 9, 16), at an era when Greece and Rome were but developing their energies for the arts and strategies; then, for a century "Magna Græcia" had carried off the chief prizes at Olympia, and therein exhibited a high state of discipline, attention to the training of noble horses, and generally physical and mental culture. At a later period, Epaminondas fought for the recognition in Greece of "the laws of the Achæans," and the "Achean league" was the cause of Philopamen, ere the fatal decline of the once glorious Hellas.

The Apollo and Hercules, and the Dioscouri, are supposed by their reception in Magna Græcia, to constitute it Doraic.

(Müll., "Dor.") The sussitai, or public tables, are again taken, as of the Doric nationality (Niebuhr's "Rome"); but these assume the whole case in its very material points. Were not these severally received into the early Hellenic civilization? If the Hercules of an early era be of the Assyrian type, and the Apollo the source or council of emigration westward, how can we fix among the dates of Doric, Heracleids, or of Delphi under Doric rule, institutions that, respectively, must have preceded the emerging of the Doric power from the area of a camp, or its four towns near Phocis? The Dorians have to make out their title up to the era of the "Iliad,”—not to arraign that of the Achæans; to prove their own development, not to ignore one preceding theirs. The Spartan Lycurgus pairs off with Pythagoras (Müll., "Dor.,") from the annals of really authentic records; but the latter, in the traditions of Magna Græcia (Tamblicus in vitá), was contemporary with "Abaris the Hyperborean," a case with a Cimric aspect. The common table or hospitality of the commune has features of the British tything; the other, Pythagorean discipline, including its practice of the musical art, is of the same order; but the very idea of moral culture, the xooμos of the "Pythagoreans," is of that high Aramitic and Druid character, whence human wisdom became and was received as oracular, and civilization remained permanent, in successive migrations of the people from the Caspian to the island-shores of the Atlantic. In asserting so much for our own race, we are not, if their title be proved, to exclude the Achæans or Dorians from an Aramitic origin. In presuming or admitting such a title, we supersede the comparatively minute proofs of civilization, from a sojourn at Crete or Delphi, or at least repel the assumption that Crete or Delphi, at any period within or approaching the Hellenic historical period, can furnish any proofs whatever, to make or deny an exclusive title for the Dorians to the system of civilization in which they more or less participated.

Concede the whole statement of Müller, in his argument

for a Doric title to those institutional names; they received Apollo and Hercules: but whence? Go a step further: several important colonies spoke the Doric language or dialect, and copied its principal departments of political administration. The question above all is, What dialect was the Achæan, who, with the Hellenes, comprised all or both the nationalities of Greece at the date of the "Iliad?" All Sicily, including Syracuse, of Corinthian foundation, spoke the Doric dialect. "Our origin is Corinthian, and therefore we speak Doric," is an argument of one of the characters in Theocritus (Adoniaz., 53); as Thucydides, also (vi., 77), divides Hellenism into two tongues, Ionic and Doric. (Müll., " Dorians," i., 6, 7.) If we go back to the Peloponese, many cities or states, including Amycle (Ib., i., 5, 13), survived in Achæan independence the revolution of the returning "Heraclidæ." What language, we may ask, belonged before that era to the Peloponese? It is very unusual for an armed minority, in overthrowing a dynasty, to eradicate the language of the conquered people. But Syracuse was founded jointly by Corinthians and settlers from Olympia, people from both sides of the Peloponese: the language of Syracuse was the Doric. The honours of Arethusa of Syracuse was a national institution there, derived from the Western Peloponese, and the name, "Nine Rivers," or ninth river, accords there with the fact of nine rivers in the neighbourhood of Alpheus, all bearing Aramitic names in an Achæan district. Thus, so far, the Sicilian Greek was an Asiatic graft on the Sanscrit, and the Doric was similarly circumstanced, with similar results; Sicily spoke Doric, and Laconia spoke a Sicilian dialect.

If, from the Doric dialect, we turn to the Syssitia, here the barley-cake, μaļai, i. e., maize, i, unleavened cake; the allowance, aixλov, i. e.,, Achol, to eat; the title of the divisions or messes, Phiditid, П, to separate;—all belong to one vocabulary or origin. Even the peculiarly Spartan Lescha is Aramitic, 7, a chamber or room, though