The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
promoted at certain stages of its progress by changes and dislocations which were happening in the mother country. The ultimate cause of these movements, which affected almost the whole of Greece from north to south, was probably the pressure of the Illyrians; but we have no means of determining how these movements were related to one another as cause and effect; so that, although we may suspect their interdependence, it is safer to treat them as separate and distinct.
The downward pressure of the Illyrians was fatal to Aetolia. In the Homeric poems we have a reflected glimpse of the prosperity of the Aetolian coast-land. We see that “Pleuron by the sea and rocky Calydon” and the other strong cities of that region were abreast of the civilisation of the heroic age; and the Aetolian myth of Meleager and the hunting of the Calydonian boar became a part of the heritage of the national legend of Greece. Maritime Aetolia was then a land of wine; its pride in its vineyards is displayed in the name of its mythic kings. But in the later ages of Greek history all this is changed. We find Aetolia regarded as a half barbarous country, the abode of men who speak indeed a Greek tongue, but have lagged ages and ages behind the rest of Greece in science and civilization. And we find the neighboring countries in the same case. Epirus, or the greater part of it, had been hellenized when the worship of Zeus was introduced at Dodona, to become famous and venerable throughout the Greek world. Suddenly it lapses into comparative barbarism, and the sanctuary of Dodona remains a lonely outpost. The explanation of this falling away is the irruption and conquest of Illyrian invaders. It was not through laziness or degeneracy, or through geographical disadvantages, that the Greeks of Epirus and Aetolia fell out of the race; it was because they were overwhelmed by a rude and barbarous people, who swamped their civilization instead of assimilating it. The Aetolians and Epirots of history are mainly of Illyrian stock.
This invasion naturally drove some of the Greek inhabitants to seek new homes elsewhere. It was easy to cross the gulf, and Aetolian emigrants made their way to the river Peneus, where they settled and took to themselves the name of Eleans or “Dalesmen”. They won dominion over the Epeans, the first Greek settlers and gradually extended their power to the Alpheus. Their land was a tract of downs with a harbourless coast, and they never became a maritime power. The people in this western plain of the peninsula were distinguished by their veneration of Pelops, a god who, though his name is Greek, perhaps represents a native deity. His worship had taken deep root at Pisa on the banks of the river Alpheus. It was a spot which in a later age, when the Greeks had spread overseas into distant lands, was to become one of the holiest seats of Greek religion, where the greatest of the Aryan, the supremest of the Hellenic, gods was to draw to his sacred precinct men from all quarters of the Greek world, to do him honour with sacrifices and games. But even when Pisa had come to be illustrious as Olympia, even when the temple and altar of the Olympian Zeus had eclipsed all other associations of the place, Pelops still received his offering. He was degraded indeed to the rank of a hero—a fate which befell many other old deities to whom early legend had given no place in Olympus among the divine sons and daughters of Zeus. But though Pelops himself was remembered only as a legendary figure, except in one or two places like Olympia where his old worship survived, his name is living still in one of the most familiar geographical names of Greece. It is in the regions near the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, where the existence of the bridge at Corinth may be easily unremembered, that men would be most tempted to call the great peninsula an island. And so, when Pelops was still widely worshipped, the most honoured god on the western coast, the name “island of Pelops” originated on that side—not, probably, in the peninsula itself, but on the opposite shores, in Aetolia for example; and then it made its way into universal use and clung henceforward to southern Greece.
The pressure of the Illyrians in Epirus led to two movements of great consequence, the Thessalian and the Boeotian migration. There is nothing to show decisively that these two movements happened at the same time or were connected with each other. A folk named Petthăloi, but called by men of other dialects Thessaloi, crossed the bills and settled in the western corner of the land which is bounded by Pelion and Pindus. They gained the upper hand and spread their sway over northern Argos. They drove the Achaeans southwards into the mountains of Phthia, and henceforward these Achaeans play no part of any note in the history of Greece. The Thessalian name soon spread over the whole country, which is called Thessaly to the present day. Crannon, Pagasae, Larisa, and Pherae became the seats of lords who reared horses and governed the surrounding districts. The conquered people were reduced to serfdom and were known as the Labourers they cultivated the soil, at their own risk, paying a fixed amount to their lords; and they had certain privileges; they could not be sold abroad or arbitrarily put to death. But they gained one victory over their conquerors; the Achaean language prevailed. The Thessalians gave up their own idiom and learned, not indeed without modifying, the speech of their subjects, so that the dialect of historic Thessaly bears a close resemblance to the tongue which we find spoken by the Achaean settlers in Asia Minor. When they had established themselves in the lands of the Peneus, the Thessalians pressed northward against the Perrhaebi, eastward against the Magnetes, and southward against the Achaeans of Phthia, and reduced them all to tributary subjection. We know almost nothing of the history of the Thessalian kingdoms; in later times we find the whole country divided into four great divisions: Thessaliotis, in the south-west, the quarter which may have been the first settlement and home of the Thessalian invaders; Phthiotis of the Achaeans in the south; Pelasgiotis, a name which records the survival of the Pelasgians, one of the older peoples; and Histiaeotis, the land of the Histiaeans, who have no separate identity in history. All the lordships of the land were combined in a very loose political organisation, which lay dormant in times of peace; but through which, to meet any emergency of war, they could elect a common captain, with the title of tăgos.
But all the folk did not remain to fall under the thraldom imposed by the new lords. A portion of the Achaeans migrated southward to the Peloponnesus. The Achaean wanderers were probably accompanied by their neighbours the Hellenes, who lived on the upper waters of the river Spercheus. The Achaeans and Hellenes together founded settlements along the strip of coast which forms the northern side of the Corinthian Gulf; and the whole country was called Achaea. Thus there were two Achaean lands, the old Achaea in the north, now shrunk into the mountains of Phthia, and the new Achaea in the south; while in the land which ought to have been the greatest Achaea of all, the Asiatic land in which the poetry of Europe took shape, the Achaean name was merged in the less significant title of Aeolis. There was also apparently a movement to Euboea, in consequence of the Thessalian invasion: according to tradition, Histiaea in the north of the island and Eretria in the centre owed their origin to settlers from Thessaly, and there is independent evidence that there was truth in this tradition.
The lands of Helicon and Cithaeron experienced a similar shock to that which unsettled and changed the lands of Olympus and Othrys; but the results were not the same. The old home of the Boeotians was in Mount Boeon in Epirus; the mountain gave them their name. Their dialect was probably closely akin to the original dialect of the Thessalians, being marked by certain characters which enable us to distinguish roughly a north-western group of dialects from those spoken by the earliest invaders of Greece. Coming from the west, or north, the Boeotians first occupied places in the west of the land which they were to make their own. From Chaeronea and Coronea, they won Thebes which was held by an old folk called the Cadmeans. Thence they sought to spread their power over the whole land. They spread their name over it, for it was called Boeotia, but they did not succeed in winning full domination as rapidly as the Thessalians succeeded in Thessaly. The rich lords of Orchomenus preserved their independence for hundreds of years, and it was not till the sixth century that anything like a Boeotian unity was established. The policy of the Boeotian conquerors, who were perhaps comparatively few in number, was unlike that of the Thessalians; the conquered communities were not reduced to serfdom. On the other hand they did not, like the Thessalians, adopt or adapt the speech of the older inhabitants; but the idioms of the conquerors and conquered coalesced and formed a new Boeotian dialect.
The Boeotian conquest, there can be little doubt, caused some of the older peoples to wander forth to other lands; and it may explain the participation of the Cadmeans and the men of Lebadea and others in some of the Ionian settlements. Moreover the coming of the Boeotians probably unsettled some of the neighbouring peoples, and drove them to change their abodes.
West of Boeotia, in the land of the Phocians