The beginings of the Hellenic nation of Greece.

Greece The Beginnings of a Nation Part 1

The history of a nation is by no means to be regarded solely as a consequence of the natural condition of its local habitations. But thus much it is easy to perceive : a formation of soil as peculiar as that commanding the basin of the Archipelago may well give a peculiar direc tion to the development of the history of its inhabitants.

In Asia great complexes of countries possess a history common to all of them. There one nation raises itself over a multitude of others, and in every case decrees of fate fall, to which vast regions, with their millions of in habitants, are uniformly subjected. Against a history of this kind every foot-breadth of Greek land rises in protest. There the ramification of the mountains has formed a se ries of cantons, every one of which has received a natural call and a natural right to a separate existence.

The villagers of wide plains quail at the thought of de fending their laws and property against an overpowering force of arms ; they submit to what is the will of heaven, and the survivor tranquilly builds himself a new hut near the ruins of the old. But where the land which has been with difficulty cultivated is belted by mountains with lofty ridges and narrow passes, which a little band is able to hold against a multitude, there men receive, together with these weapons of defence, the courage for using them. In the members of every local federation arises the feeling of belonging together by the will and command of God ; the common state grows by itself out of the hamlets of the valley ; and in every such state there springs up at the same time a consciousness of an independence fully justi fied before God and man. He who desires to enslave such a land must attack and conquer it anew in every one of its mountain valleys. In the worst case the summits of the mountains and inaccessible caves are able to shelter the remnant of the free inhabitants of the land.

But, besides the political independence, it is also the multiplicity of culture, manners, and language character istic of Ancient Greece which it is impossible to conceive as existent without the multiplicitous formation of its ter ritory, for without the barriers of the mountains the vari ous elements composing its population would have early lost their individuality by contact with one another.

Now Hellas is not only a secluded and well guarded country, but, on the other hand, again sphere and more open to commerce than any other country the sea of the ancient world. For from three sides the sea penetrates into all parts of the country ; and while it accustoms men's eyes to greater acuteness and their minds to higher enterprise, never ceases to excite their fancy for the sea, which, in regions where no ice binds it during the whole course of the year, effects an incomparably closer union between the lands than is the case with the inhospitable inland seas of the North.

If it is easily agitated, it is also easily calmed again ; its dangers are diminished by the multitude of safe bays for anchorage, which the mariner may speedily reach at the approach of foul weather. They are further decreased by the transparent clearness of the atmosphere, which allows the mariner at daytime to recognize the guiding points of his course at a distance of as many as twenty miles, and at night spreads over his head a cloudless sky, where the rising and setting of the stars in peaceful tranquility regulate the business of peasant and mariner. The winds are the legislators of the weather ; but even they, in these latitudes submit to certain rules, and only rarely rise to the vehemence of desolating hurricanes. Never, except in the short winter season, is there any uncertain irregularity in wind and weather ; the commencement of the fair season the safe months, as the ancients called it brings Avith it an I'm mutable law followed by the winds in the entire Archi pelago : every morning the north wind arises from the coasts of Thrace, and passes over the whole island-sea ; so that men were accustomed to designate all the regions lying beyond that of these coasts as the side beyond the north wind. This is the wind which once carried Miltiades to Lemnos, and at all times secured advantages of such importance to those who commanded the northern coasts.

Often these winds (the Etesian) for weeks to gether assume the character of a storm, and when the sky is clear waves of froth appear as far as the eye can see ; but the winds are regular enough to be free from danger, and they subside at sunset : then the sea becomes smooth, and air and water tranquil, till almost impercept ibly a slight contrary wind arises, a breeze from the south. When the mariner at Egina becomes aware of this, he weighs anchor, and drops into the Pirreus in a few hours of the night. This is the sea-breeze sung of by the poets of antiquity, and now called the Embates, whose approach is ever mild, soft, and salutary. The currents passing along the coasts facilitate navigation in the gulfs and sounds of the sea ; the flight of migratory birds, the shoals of tunny-fish reappearing at fixed seasons of the year, serve as welcome signs for the mariner. The regu larity in the whole life of nature and in the motion of air and sea, the mild and humane character of the Aegean, essentially contributed to make the inhabitants of its coasts use it with the fullest confidence, and live on and with it.

Men soon learn all the secrets of the art of river nav igation to an end, but never those of navigating the sea ; the differences between dwellers on the banks of a river soon vanish by mutual contact, whereas the sea suddenly brings the greatest contrasts together; strangers arrive who have been living under another sky, and according to other laws : there ensues an endless comparing, learning and teaching, and the more remunerative the interchange of the produce of different countries, the more restlessly the human mind labors victoriously to oppose the dangers of the sea by a constant succession of new inventions.

The Euphrates and the Nile from year to year offer the same advantages to the population on their banks, and regulate its occupations in a constant monotony; which makes it possible for centuries to pass over the land without any change taking place in the essential habits of the lives of its inhabitants. Revolutions occur, but no development, and, mummy-like, the civilization of the Egyptians stagnates, enshrouded in the Valley of the Nile : they count the monotonous beats of the pendulum of time, but time contains nothing for them ; they possess a chronology but no history in the full sense of the word. Such a death-in-life is not permitted by the flowing waves of the Jegean, which, as soon as commerce and mental activity have been once awakened, unceasingly continues and develops them.

Lastly, with regard to the natural gifts of the soil, a great difference prevailed between the eastern and western half of the land of Greece. The Athenian had only to ascend a few hours' journey from the mouths of the rivers of Asia Minor to assure himself how much more remune rative agriculture was there, and to admire and envy the deep layers of most fertile soil in Jeolis and Ionia. There the growth of both plants and animals manifested greater luxuriance, the intercourse in the wide plains in comparably greater facility. We know how in the Euro pean country the plains are only let in between the moun tains, like furrows or narrow basins, or, as it were, washed on to their extremest ridge ; and the single passage from one valley to the other led over lofty ridges, which men were obliged to open up for themselves, and then, with unspeakable labor, to provide with paths for beasts of bur den and vehicles. The waters of the plains were equally grudging of the blessings expected from them. Far the greater number of them in summer were dried-up rivers, sons of the Nereides dying in their youth, according to ' the version of mythology ; and although the drought in \ the country is incomparably greater now than it was in ancient times, yet, since men remembered, the veins of water of the Ilissus, as well as of the Inachus, had been hidden under a dry bed of pebbles. Yet this excessive drought is again accompanied by a superabundance of water, which, stagnating in one place in the basin of a valley, in another between mountains and sea, renders the air pestiferous and cultivation difficult. Everywhere there was a call for labor and a struggle. And yet at how early a date would Greek history have come to an end had its only theatre been under the skies of Ionia !

It was, after all, only in European Hellas that the fulness of energy of which the nation was capable came to light, on that soil so much more sparingly endowed by nature ; here, after all, men's bodies received a more powerful and their minds a freer development ; here the country \vhich they made their own, by drainage, and embankment, and artificial irrigation, became their native land in a fuller sense than the land on the opposite shore, where the gifts of God dropped into men's laps without any effort being necessary for their attainment.

Greece consist in the measure of its natural properties. Its inhabitant enjoys the full blessings of the South ; he is rejoiced and animated by the warm splendor of its skies, by the serene atmosphere of its days, and the refreshing mildness of its nights. His necessa ries of life he easily obtains from land and sea ; nature and climate train him in temperance. His country is hilly ; but his hills, instead of being rude heights are arable and full of pastures, and thus act as the guardians of liberty. He dwells in an island-country, blessed with all the advantages of southern coasts, yet enjoying at the same time the benefits proper to a vast and uninterrupted complex of territory.

Earth and water, hill and plain, drought and damp, the snow-storms of Thrace and the aeat of a tropical sun all the contrasts, all the forms of the life of nature, combine in the greatest variety of ways to awaken and move the mind of man. But as these contrasts all dissolve into a higher harmony, which embraces the entire coast and island-country of the Archipelago, so man was led to complete the measure of har mony between the contrasts which animate conscious life, between enjoyment and labor, between the sensual and the spiritual, between thought and feeling.

The innate powers of a piece of ground only become ap parent when the plants created for it by nature drive the fibres of their roots into it, and develop, on the site so happily discovered, in the full favor of light and air, the whole fulness of their natural powers. In the life of plants the scientific investigator is able to show how the particular components of the soil favor each particular or ganization ; in the life of nations a deeper mystery sur rounds the connection between a country and its history.

Of no nation are the beginnings known to history. Its horizon is not entered by the nations of the earth till after they have already gained a peculiar form of their own, and have learnt to assert their individuality, as against neighboring nations ; but before that period has arrived centuries have passed, of which no man may count the succession. The science of language is no better able than her sister sciences to measure this prehistoric time : but to her alone belong the means of casting a light upon its obscurity ; it is in her power to supplement the beginnings of history out of the most ancient documents of the life of nations ; for in their languages a connection of kinsmanship may be demonstrated between the most different peoples, otherwise linked to one another by no tradition of history.

And thus also has the Greek language long been recognized as one of the Indo-Germanic or Aryan Greek of the sister languages, the mutual agreement of which Greeks complete enough to justify the conclusion that all the nations of this family of languages are only branches of one great nation, which, in times I'm memorial, was settled in Upper Asia, and included the ancestors of the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Italicans, Ger mans, Slaves, and Celts.

This Aryan primitive people did not at once separate into its different parts, but the latter grew out of the mother-trunk like branches : gradually the members fell off, and in very different currents ensued the movements of population westwards from the common home, to form settlements in particular localities.

It has been assumed on good grounds that the Celts, who pushed forward far thest to the west, were the first to separate from the main body, and to immigrate into Europe. The Celts were followed by the Germans, and last of all by the Slavs, united with the Letts (Lithuanians), These together form a North-European body of nations and languages.

Distinct from these, there existed a second succession of nations, which separated from the primitive trunk at a later date, and whose mission it was to occupy the islands on the coast and the peninsulas of the Mediterranean ; whereas the Medo-Persian and untouched by Western influences, while the Indian family of nations remained behind deep in the heart of Asia.

The two main members of the above-mentioned second succession of nations, which settled on the coasts of the same sea opposite to one another, in localities of a similar character, and by the history of classic antiquity were anew united into an in separable pair of nations, the Greeks and the Italians, appear to us so closely intertwined from the very first by the homogeneous character of their languages, that we are obliged to assume the existence of a period in which both, separated from all other nations, formed one nation by themselves.

As such, they not only, in addition to the most ancient common property of all Sanscrit nations, collected and developed a new common treasure of words and terms (as is, e. g., evidenced in the names common to both for the fruits and implements of the field, for wine and oil, and in their agreement in the designation of the goddess presiding over the fire of the hearth) ; but, which is still more important, they are at one in their phonetic laws, especially in the multiplicity and delicacy of shades peculiar to Latin and Greek in their vocalization.

The a-sound prevailing in Sanscrit divided itself into three sounds, a, e, o ; and by this subdivision of the vowel there accrued not only a gain in euphony, but the possibility of a more delicate organization in the formation of language. For it constitutes the basis of the formation of the declensions,, of the clear distinction between the masculine and feminine gender on the one, and the neuter on the other, side; a main advantage, which these languages possess above all others. Finally, before the Greeks and Italians separated into two nations, they perfected a law which affords a remarkable proof of the fact that these races were pre-eminently distinguished by a sense of order and regularity.

They would not even leave to arbitrary decision what is most evanescent in language, the accentuation of words, but introduced the fixed rule, that no main accent should fall farther back than the antepenultimate. By this means the unity of words is protected ; the final syllables are secured, which easily lose by the accent fall ing farther back ; and lastly, notwithstanding all the se verity of the rule, sufficient liberty is permitted to make recognizable by slight changes of accentuation the differ ence of genders and cases in nouns, and of tenses and moods in verbs.

These instances of harmony in language are the most ancient documents of a common national history of the Greeks and Italians, the testimonies of a period in which, on one of the resting-places of the great migration in Asia from east to west, the two nations dwelt together in concord as one people of Greco-Italicans, as we may call them : and if we may dare to indicate, in accordance with what is common to both branches in language and history, the character of the primitive people, we shall find its features to consist, above all, in a sense of reasonable order, founded on a peasant life, in a dislike of everything arbitrary and chaotic, in a manly effort to attain to a clear development, and to a rational system of laws, life, and thought. Thedis Apart from these important and vital instinctive stances of harmony, we see a very great differences prevailing between the two languages.

The Greek language has an abundance of consonant sounds ; it especially preserves the complete series of mute consonants

On the other hand, the Greek lost at an early period two as pirated sounds, the j and the v (faithfully preserved in Latin), the so-called Digamma, which was indeed retained in certain spoken dialects, but was otherwise either utterly lost, or changed into the aspirate sound (spiritus asper), or dissolved into a diphthong.

Neither were the Greeks able to preserve the sibilant sound to the acuteness in which it remains in the Indian and Italic languages (cf. Sama, simul,).

This loss and weakening of important sounds is very susceptible in Greek. The roots of words have in many instances lost their distinguishing characteristics, and the most various roots have, in consequence of the destruction of their initial-sounds (anlaute), become confused together, till it is almost impossible to recognize them individually. But, in spite of these evils, we continue to remark the thorough-going process of the language, its consistency and regularity, the certainty of its orthography a testimony of the great delicacy of the vocal organs which distinguished the Hellenes from the barbarians and of a clearly-marked pronunciation, such as the Italic races seem not to have possessed in an equal degree.

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