The History of Ancient Greece: 3rd millennium B.C. - 323 B.C.. John Bagnell Bury
of the later Greeks did not forget that there had been no serious disturbance of the population. The Arcadians had lived in their country before the birth of the moon; the people of Attica were children of the earth. In other words, there had been no unsettling conquest in those countries. The folks who lived there before the Greeks came received Greek settlers in their midst, and gradually became Greeks themselves. And in many other lands, though greater changes befell than in Attica and Arcadia, the elder inhabitants probably remained as numerous as the newcomers. There was fusion nearly everywhere; and perhaps there is barely one case in which we can speak of pure Greek blood.
The old home of the Greek invaders, from which they gradually filtered into Greece, probably lay in the north-west regions of the Balkan peninsula. They were not a mere horde of roving shepherds; their wealth doubtless consisted in flocks and herds, but they understood tillage, and were a folk of settled habits. It is therefore to be presumed that there was some cause, other than mere restlessness, for their southward migration; and this cause is to be sought in the pressure of the Illyrians, their neighbours on the north, another people of Aryan speech like their own. We shall hardly go too far back if we place the beginnings of the migration well into the third millennium. And we must keep in view the fact that a parallel movement was going on throughout the same period in the eastern half of the Balkan peninsula. While the Greeks were being pressed forward in the west, the Phrygians and Trojans, who originally had dwellings in western Macedonia and southern Thrace, were being pressed forward in the east and were filtering across the straits into Asia Minor. It is highly probable that the ultimate causes of all these movements in the peninsula were closely connected, but they lie wholly beyond our vision.
The first important thing to grasp about the coming of the Greeks into Greece is that it was not a single coming, but a series of successive comings. There is every reason to believe that this process of infiltration extended over centuries: each shock that they sustained from their northern neighbours caused a new movement southward. They did not sweep down in a great invading host; they crept in, tribe by tribe, seeking not political conquest but new lands and homesteads. Thus we may be sure that north-western Greece, the lands of Epirus, Acarnania, and Aetolia, were lands of Greek speech for many years before the conquest of the Peloponnesus began. But along with the directly southward movement into Epirus, there seems to have been also a south-easterly movement towards the north-west corner of the Aegean. The Macedonian Greeks, closely pressed by the Illyrians, settled on the lower waters of the river Axius, and perhaps it was this movement that drove the Phrygians eastward. The Achaeans and others found abodes in the country which was in after days to be known as Thessaly.
But on the other hand there is no reason to suppose that the Greeks had spread over all northern Greece or completely conquered it before they began to pass into the southern peninsula. The first Greeks who had settled in the Peloponnesus must have crossed by boat from the north-western shores of the Corinthian Gulf; and we may take it that the countries which were afterwards called Achaea, Elis, and Messenia, along with the Arcadian highlands, which form the centre of the peninsula, had begun to be hellenized at an earlier date than Laconia and Argolis. It was from the other side that Greeks first reached the coast of Argolis. From Thessaly and the north they found their way down the side of eastern Greece, to Euboea and the shores of Attica and the Cyclad islands and the Argolic coast. Among the settlements in Attica some seem to have been made by a people called the Iāvŏnes or Ionians; and they also settled in Argolis. The Dryopes and Phocians found habitations in the regions of Mount Oeta and Mount Parnassus. Other settlers penetrated from the north into the fertile mountain-girt country which was not yet Boeotia. Among these the Minyae, who inhabited Orchomenus in the heroic age, are generally and perhaps rightly included; though it is possible that “Minyae” represents the original name of the native people whom the Greek settlers hellenized.
All this was a long and gradual process. It needed many years for the Greeks to blend with the older inhabitants and hellenize the countries in which they settled. In eastern Greece, where the Aegean civilisation flourished, the influence was reciprocal. While the Greeks gradually imposed their language on the native races, they learned from a civilisation which was more advanced than their own. Things shaped themselves differently in different places, according to the number of the Greek settlers and the power and culture of the native people. In some countries, as seemingly in Attica, a small number of Greek strangers leavened the whole population and spread the Greek tongue; thus Attica became Greek, but the greater part of its inhabitants were sprung, not from Greeks, but from the old people who lived there before the Greeks came. In other countries the invaders came in larger numbers, and the inhabitants were forced to make way for them. In Thessaly it would seem that the Greeks drove the Pelasgians back into one region of the country and spread over the rest themselves. We may say, at all events, that there was a time for most lands in Greece when the Greek strangers and the native people lived side by side, speaking each their own tongue and exercising a mutual influence which was to end in the fusion of blood, out of which the Greeks of history sprang.
No reasonable system of chronology can avoid the conclusion that Greeks had already settled in the area of Aegean civilisation, when the Aegean civilisation of the bronze age was at its height. Coming as they came, they necessarily fell under its influence in a way which could not have been the case if they had swept down in mighty hordes, conquered the land by a few swoops, and destroyed or enslaved its peoples. It is another question how far the process of assimilation had already advanced when the lords of Mycenae and Orchomenus and the other royal strongholds built their hill-tombs; and it is yet another whether any of these lords belonged to the race of the Greek strangers. To these questions we can give no positive answers; but this much we know: in the twelfth century, if not sooner, the Greeks began to expand in a new direction, eastward beyond the sea; and they bore with them to the coast of Asia the Aegean civilisation. That civilisation represents the environment of the heroic age of Greece.
There can be little doubt that the mixture of the Greeks with the native peoples had a decisive effect upon the differentiation of the Greek dialects. The dialects spoken by the first settlers in Thessaly, in Attica, in Arcadia, have some common characteristics which tempt us to mark them as a group, and distinguish them from another set of dialects spoken by Greek folks which were to appear somewhat later on the stage of history. We may conjecture that the first set of invaders spoke in their old home much the same idiom; that this was differently modified in Thessaly and Boeotia, in Attica and Argolis, and the various countries where they settled; and that many of the local peculiarities were developed in the mouths of the conquered learning the tongue of the conquerors.
SECT. 5. EXPANSION OF THE GREEKS TO THE EASTERN AEGEAN
The first Greeks who sailed across the Aegean were the Achaeans and their fellows from the hills and plains of Thessaly and the plain of the Spercheus. Their expeditions probably started from the land-locked bay of Pagasae, and tradition long afterwards associated the first sea-ventures of the Greeks with the port of Iavolkos.
Along with the Achaeans there sailed as comrades and allies the Aeŏlians. Some indeed believe that “Aeolian” was simply another name for “Achaean”; but it seems safer to regard the Aeolians as distinct from, though closely related to, the Achaeans. It is impossible to determine whether those who crossed the Aegean were settlers in Thessaly, and not rather some of the Aeolians who lived beyond the mountains by another seaboard, on the northern shore of the Corinthian Gulf. We know that in early times these Aeolians were engaged in constant warfare with the Aetolians, who ultimately won the upper hand and gave their name to the whole country. And perhaps the pressure of these foes induced some of them to throw in their lot with the Achaeans who were sailing in search of new homes beyond the sea. It need not surprise us that men of Aetolia should be in touch with men of Thessaly. There has always been a route of communication through the mountains connecting north-eastern Greece with the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, and it was just as easy three thousand years ago to walk from Iolcus to Calydon as it is to-day from Volo to Mesolongi.
It was to the northern part of Asia Minor, the island of Lesbos and the opposite shores, that the Achaean and Aeolian adventurers steered their ships. Here they planted the first Hellenic settlements on Asiatic soil—the beginning of a movement which, before a thousand years had passed away, was to carry Greek conquerors