Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, August 1847. Various
till long after the whole had become Hellenic." (P. 54.) Herodotus had said that certain Pelasgians living in his time spoke a language different from the Greeks. Dr Thirlwall puts the passage of Herodotus upon the rack to extract from it a confession that the difference was not greater than between one dialect of Greek from another. Yet, as the narrative proceeds—if narrative it can be called—we have the Pelasgians and the Greeks represented as essentially distinct people; and we hear of the difficulty of determining "the precise point of civilisation to which the Pelasgians had advanced, before the Greeks overtook and outstripped them." The whole treatise, notwithstanding the air of decision now and then assumed, is but an amplification of the doubt implied in the very first sentence of it.
The legends which fill up the dark space with eponymous heroes, as they have been called—heroes who take the name of a tribe in order to bestow it back upon the tribe; for it was the Greek mode of thinking at these early periods to presume that every tribe, or gens, had a common progenitor from whom it took its title and origin,—these legends are at one time treated with the due suspicion which should attend upon them; yet, at another, if a fortunate congruity, some lucky "dovetailing," can be observed amongst them, they are raised into the rank of historical evidence. The mode of interpretation which we have described as characterising the first and undisciplined age of critical inquiry, is not laid aside. Such personages as Danaus and Æolus are still referred to on emergency; and Dr Thirlwall still speaks of the Centaurs as "a fabulous race, which, however, may be supposed to represent the earlier and ruder inhabitants of the land." If we must call in the Centaurs to our assistance, we may safely conclude with Mr Grote that the ancient Pelasgians are "not knowable."
"Whoever," writes our author, when the course of his narrative brings him to speak of the anti-Hellenic tribes—"Whoever has examined the many conflicting systems respecting the Pelasgi—from the literal belief of Clavier, Larcher, and Raoul Rochette, (which appears to me at least the most consistent way of proceeding,) to the interpretative and half-incredulous processes applied by abler men—such as Niebuhr, or O. Müller, or Dr Thirlwall—will not be displeased with my resolution to decline so insoluble a problem. No attested facts are now present to us—none were present to Herodotus and Thucydides even in their age, on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the anti-Hellenic Pelasgians; and where such is the case we may without impropriety apply the remark of Herodotus respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean—that the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism."2 And he adds the following pithy note:—"Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing up their cumulative effect, asserts, 'not as an hypothesis, but with full historical conviction, that there was a time when the Pelasgians, perhaps the most extended people in all Europe, were spread from the Po and the Arno to the Rhyndakus,' (near Cyzicus,) with only an interruption in Thrace. What is perhaps the most remarkable of all, is the contrast between his feeling of disgust, despair, and aversion to the subject when he begins the inquiry:—'the name Pelasgi,' he says, 'is odious to the historian, who hates the spurious philology out of which the pretences to knowledge on the subject of such extinct people arise;' and the full confidence and satisfaction with which he concludes it."
Amongst these legends which Mr Grote thus relates for the simple purpose of showing what filled the minds of the Greek people when we first become historically acquainted with them, is one conspicuous above all others, and to which most men still cling tenaciously, finding it impossible to resign all of it to the region of fable—we mean "the divine tale of Troy." Many who relinquish without effort the Argonautic expedition, and as an historical problem are glad to be rid of it,—who resign all attempt to extract a prosaic truth out of the exploits of Theseus or the labours of Hercules, and who smile at mention of the race of Amazons—a race so well accredited in ancient times that neither the sceptical Arrian nor Julius Cæsar himself ventured to doubt of their existence—would yet shrink from surrendering the tale of Troy, with all its military details, and all its hosts, and all its kings and chieftains, entirely to the domain of fiction. What! No part of it true?—no Agamemnon?—no Ulysses?—no Troy taken?—no battles on that plain where the traveller still traces the position of the hostile forces? "Those old kings," they might exclaim in the language of Milton, when writing in his history of that fabulous line of English monarchs which sprang from Brute the Trojan—in his time still lingering in men's faith, now suffered to sleep unvexed by the keenest historical research,—"Those old and inborn kings, never any to have been real persons, or done in their lives at least some part of what so long hath been remembered—it cannot be thought, without too strict incredulity."3
Nevertheless the whole narrative, were it not for the familiarity we early acquire with the persons and exploits of this famous legend, would be seen at once to have all the characteristics of poetic fiction. And it is curious to trace, with our author, how, after having long stood its ground as veritable history amongst the people of Greece, it sustained attack after attack, first from ancient then from modern criticism, and has been gradually denuded of all its glorious circumstance, till now, even for those who are most willing to believe, there remains the driest, scantiest residue imaginable of what may be pronounced to be probable fact. Herodotus, with all his veneration for Homer, could not assent to attribute the Trojan war to the cause popularly assigned: he seems to have been of the opinion of our Payne Knight, that the Greeks and Trojans could not have been so mad as to incur so dire calamities "for one little woman." We confess that, for ourselves, this is not the part of the story which would have first staggered us. The immediate cause may be very trifling that brings two angry rivals into conflict, and, the war once commenced, they fight on for victory; the first object of the strife is forgotten in the strife itself, and each opponent thinks only how to destroy his enemy. Herodotus, however, had heard another account from the priests of Egypt, which made him still more disposed to dispute the popular tradition. According to this account, Helen was in fact detained in Egypt during the whole term of the siege. Paris, it seems, in sailing from Sparta, had been driven thither by a storm; and the king of Egypt, hearing of the wrong he had committed towards Menelaus, had sent him out of the country, and detained Helen till her lawful husband should appear to claim her. The misfortune was, that when the Greeks before Troy demanded Helen, and were told that she neither was, nor had been in the town, they would not believe the story, but continued to thunder at the gates. "For if Helen had really been in Troy," says Herodotus, "she would certainly have been given up, even if she had been mistress of Priam himself instead of Paris: the Trojan king, with all his family and all his subjects, would never knowingly have incurred utter and irretrievable destruction for the purpose of retaining her; their misfortune was, that while they did not possess, and therefore could not restore her, they yet found it impossible to convince the Greeks that such was the fact."
Pausanias, a reasoning man, starts at the Trojan horse: he converts it into a battering-ram, as he cannot believe the Trojans to have been deceived by so childish a trick.
Thucydides, a man who knew something of campaigning, is astonished at the length of the siege; and perhaps his patriotism was put a little to the blush at the idea that the assembled forces of Greece should be occupied ten years before a town of very inconsiderable magnitude; for no town of Ilium, we may remark in passing, ever existed that could present a worthy object of attack to so great a power, or was at all commensurate with the vast enterprise said to have been directed against it. He concluded, therefore, without hesitation, "that the Greeks were less numerous than the poets have represented, and that being, moreover, very poor, they were unable to procure adequate and constant provisions: hence they were compelled to disperse their army, and to employ a part of it in cultivating the Chersonese, and a part in marauding expeditions over the neighbourhood. Could the whole army have been employed against Troy at once, the siege would have been much more speedily and easily concluded." As Mr Grote justly observes, the critical historian might, with equal authority, have proceeded by a shorter method, and at once abridged the length of the siege.
"Though literally believed," he continues, speaking of the Trojan war, "though reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past,
Vol. ii. p. 346.