The settlements of the Dorians without the Peloponnese.

1. On account of the multiplicity of subjects which it will be now necessary to consider, we shall be compelled to shorten the discussion of several points, and to take for granted many collateral questions, except where we may be encouraged to enter into greater detail by the hope of disclosing fresh fields for the inquiries of others.

It will be the most convenient method to make the mother-states the basis of our arrangement, as these are known with far greater certainty than the dates of the foundation of their respective colonies; by which means we shall also be enabled to take in a regular order those settlements which lie near to, and were connected with, one another.

First, the colonies of Argos, Epidaurus, and Trœzen. We will treat of these together, as they all lie in the same direction, and as the colonies of the two last states more or less recognised the supremacy of Argos, and not unfrequently followed a common leader. These extend as far as the southern extremity of Asia Minor.

The Dorians on the south-western coast of Asia Minor derived their origin, according to Herodotus, from the Peloponnese. And indeed they were generally considered as an Argive colony (from which state Strabo derives Rhodes, Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Cos), led by princes of the Heraclidæ, from whom the noble families of Rhodes, for example the Eratidæ or Diagoridæ at Ialysus, claimed to be descended.

On the comic, tragic, and lyric poetry of the Dorians.

1. At Athens, a coarse and ill-mannered jest was termed a Megarian joke; which may be considered as a certain proof of the decided propensity of that people to humour. This is confirmed by the claims of the Megarians, who disputed the invention of comedy with the Athenians, and perhaps not without justice, if indeed the term invention be at all applicable to the rise of the several branches of poetry, which sprung so gradually, and at such different times, from the particular feelings excited by the ancient festival rites, that it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to fix upon the period at which the species of composition to which each gave rise was sufficiently advanced to be called a particular kind of poetry. Yet it is in the highest degree probable that the Athenians were indebted for the earliest form of their comic poetry to the Megarians. The Megarian comedy is ridiculed by Ecphantides, one of the early comic poets of Athens, as of a rude and unpolished kind, which circumstance alone makes its higher antiquity probable. Ecphantides, whom Aristophanes, Cratinus, and others ridicule as rough and unpolished, looks down in his turn on those who had introduced comedy from Megara, and claims the merit of first seasoning the uncouth Megarian productions with Attic salt.

On the worship of Diana in the Doric and other states.

1. We now proceed to consider the worship of Diana; a subject which need not be so fully examined as that of Apollo, as it does not, like the worship of that god, every where present the same fundamental notions, and therefore cannot, in all its first beginnings, be derived from the religion of the Dorians. But as in general the Grecian mythology adopted the most various and inconsistent religious views and ideas, so in the name of the single goddess Diana were united almost opposite branches of ancient worship, which we must attempt to separate. Lest, however, it should be supposed that we are unable to trace the association of ideas, which saw a simple character in the “various forms of that great goddess, who, having her origin in the interior of Asia, passed from thence into Greece, and was worshipped as the moon, the goddess of the woods, the huntress, the nurse of children, and a nurse of the universe, as well by the choruses of the virgins of Caryæ, as in the dances of the temples;” we will endeavour to ascertain some historical criterion, which may distinguish the worship of Diana from that of any other deity, and which must not be one of the ideas or symbols of the worship itself, since it is concerning the possibility or impossibility of their connexion that we are to inquire.

General outline of the country.

1. In the Thermaic bay, the modern gulf of Salonichi, three rivers of considerable size fall into the sea at very short distances from one another, but which meet in this place in very different directions. The largest of the three comes from the north-west, and is now called (as indeed it was in the time of Tzetzes and Anna Comnena) the Bardares (or Vardar), and was in ancient days celebrated under the name of Axius. Its stream is increased by large tributary branches on both sides, and chiefly by the Erigon, which flows from the mountains of Illyria. The river next in order runs from the west; it is now called in the interior of the country Potova, and on the coast Carasmac; its ancient name, as is evident from passages in Herodotus and Strabo, was Lydias, or Ludias. And, lastly, after many turnings and windings, the Haliacmon, now called Bichlista, flows from the south-west; in the time of Herodotus it fell into the sea through the same mouth as the Lydias, probably being widened by marshes; and in modern maps the interval between the two rivers is represented as very small.

On the mixture of the Peloponnesian and Thessalian legends of the adventures of Hercules, and the confusion of Hercules with foreign heroes. On the general character of the heroic mythology.

1. We must now entreat the indulgence of our readers when we enter upon an obscure and difficult part of our subject, and one lying beyond the limits of historical record. We allude to the Peloponnesian fable of Hercules; a collection of legends doubtless for the most part invented subsequently to the Doric invasion, and intended by that nation in great measure to justify their conquest of the Peninsula, and to make their expedition appear, not as an act of wrongful aggression, but as a reassertion of ancient right. Some hero (perhaps even of the same name) must have existed in the Argive traditions in the time of the Persidæ, and the resemblance may have been sufficiently striking to identify him with the father of the Doric Hyllus. We shall therefore consider the destroyer of the Nemean lion as a native Argive hero; but the delay experienced at his birth, and his consequent exposure to want and toil, evidently belong to the Doric tradition, as well as the enmity of Juno; fables which were partly borrowed from the worship of Apollo, and may partly have been intended to indicate the contrast between the ancient worship of Argos and that of the invading race.

On the Doric Dialect.

1. The ancient grammarians divided the Greek language into four distinct branches–the Doric, Ionic, Attic, and Æolic; the latter including all dialects not comprised under the other three heads, because only one branch of it, the Lesbian, was the written language of one species of poetry: and yet this latter division must unquestionably have contained different species less connected with each other than with some branches of the other three dialects. It is, however, pretty well agreed that the several Æolic dialects together contained more remains of the primitive Grecian or (if we will so call it) Pelasgic language, than either the Doric, Ionic, or Attic; and that at the same time many forms of the latter were preserved with great fidelity in the Latin tongue; partly because the life of the Italian husbandmen bore a nearer resemblance to that of the ancient Greeks than that of the later Greeks themselves, and because neither their literature, nor any fastidious sense of euphony and rhythm, induced them to soften and refine their language. But of the more polished dialects, that of Homer, though differing in many points, yet in others doubtless closely resembled the original language, which must once have been spoken from Thessaly to the Peloponnese, and was variously metamorphosed in the Doric, Ionic, and Attic dialects.

On the diversity of Apollo Nomius, and Apollo the father of Æsculapius, from the Doric Apollo. That Apollo was not originally an elementary deity.

1. Having now treated of the extension and propagation of the worship of Apollo, and some of the most remarkable legends and fables connected with it, our attention is next turned to the nature and character of the religion itself.

In the first place, then, we shall remind the reader of a position sufficiently established by the foregoing inquiries; viz. that the Apollo of Tempe, Delphi, Delos, Crete, Lycia, Troy, Athens, and the Peloponnese, is the same god, and not, as was very frequently the case in the religions of Greece, a combination of several deities under one name. This conclusion we supported as well by historical accounts respecting the foundation of his numerous temples, as by memorials of another kind; viz. the recurrence of the same names, rites, and symbols; such, for example, as the titles of Lycius and Lycia, Delphinius and Pythius; the oracles and sibyls; the purifications and expiations; the custom of leaping from rocks; decimations; the golden summer, and bloodless oblations; the laurel-berries; the legend of the Hyperboreans, and the cycle of eight years. Hence the theologians mentioned by Ciceroe were wrong in endeavouring without any authority to make a distinction between the Athenian, Cretan, and Hyperborean Apollo.

Domestic occupations of the Spartans. Funeral ceremonies of the Dorians. On the national character of the Dorians in general. Its varieties in the Dorians of Sparta, Crete, Argos, Rhodes, Corinth, Syracuse, Sicyon, Phlius, Megara, Byzantium, Ægina, Cyrene, Crotona, Tarentum, Messenia, and Delphi.

1. After Anacharsis the Scythian had visited the different states of Greece, and lived among them all, he is reported to have said, that “all wanted leisure and tranquillity for wisdom, except the Lacedæmonians, for that these were the only persons with whom it was possible to hold a rational conversation.” The life of all the other Greeks had doubtless appeared to him as a restless and unquiet existence, as a constant struggle and effort without any object. In addition to the love of ease, which belonged to the original constitution of the Dorians, there was a further cause for this mode of life, viz. the entire exemption from necessary labour which the Spartans enjoyed, their wants being supplied by the dependent and industrious classes. Several writers have dwelt on the tedium and listlessness of such an existence; but the Spartans considered an immunity from labour an immunity from pain, and as constituting entire liberty. But, it may be asked, what was there to occupy the Spartan men from morning to night?

Among all the Greek cities built after the return of the Heraclidæ, there was none so insignificant, that Ephorus, and the writers who after him introduced the origins of cities into general history, would have been unable to state specifically and with sufficient certainty the people from which the colony had issued, and the founders who led it and gave laws to it; in far the most cases they also fixed the epoch of the foundation. When Rome was founded, which yet is supposed to be more recent than perhaps the greater part of those Greek cities; from what people the eternal city originally arose; is precisely what we do not know. But it is no less suited to the eternity of Rome for its roots to lose themselves in infinity, than what the poets sang of the rearing and deification of Romulus, befits the majesty of the city. A god, or no one, must have founded it.

Now while I acknowledge this with a love, the sincerity of which none but a bigot, insincere himself, could seek to call in question, while I allow the heart and the imagination their full rights; I at the same time assert the claims of the reason, to take nothing as historical which cannot be historical; and, without refusing to the noble tradition its place at the threshold of the history, to inquire whether it can be in any degree ascertained to what people the original Romans may have belonged, and what changes attended the rise of that state which, when the light of historical truth begins to dawn, is Rome.

When the existence of an unknown southern continent was generally believed, when its outline was drawn on maps, and it was deemed presumptuous incredulity to reject it as a fiction, an essential service was then done to knowledge by the voyagers who crossed that outline, and shewed that, though certain points and coasts included in it really existed, they conferred no reality on the imaginary continent. A further step was to give a comprehensive proof of its nonexistence. But the demands of geography could be satisfied only by the examination of the several islands which existed in the place attributed to the supposed continent; and if the navigator was kept off and prevented from landing on them by reefs and breakers, if mists obscured his view of them, still what he perceived was no longer merely negative gain: and many inferences might be drawn from our knowledge of such countries, as there were good grounds for considering to be similar or identical in their nature and population with the regions which could not be directly explored.

I do not inquire who built Rome, and gave laws to her; but what Rome was, before her history begins, and how she grew out of her cradle: on these points something may be learnt from traditions and from her institutions.

The festival called Septimontium preserved the remembrance of a time when the Capitoline, Quirinal, and Viminal hills were not yet incorporated with Rome; but when the remainder of the city, to the extent afterward inclosed, with the exception of the Aventine, which was and continued a borough, by the wall of Servius, formed a united civic community. It consisted of seven districts, which as such had each its own holidays and sacrifices even in the age of Tiberius: Palatium, Velia, Cermalus, Cælius, Fagutal, Oppius, Cispius. Not that every one of these places had a claim to be called a hill: one unquestionably, and perhaps a second, lay in the plain at the foot of a hill. Others were hights, which in later times were accounted to appertain to some neighbouring hill, as though forming a part of it, with the view of not reckoning up more than seven in Rome: for even in regard to this division, a form which had belonged to an early age and a petty state of things, was subsequently stretched by the Romans to fit a very enlarged state.

The appointment of the first dictator is placed in the tenth year after the first consuls; and by the oldest annalists T. Larcius is named as the person. Among a variety of contradictory statements, one invented by the vanity of the Valerian house assigned this honour to a nephew of Publicola. According to the date just mentioned Larcius was consul at the time, and so would only have received an enlargement of his previous power: another account related as the occasion of the appointment, what sounds probable enough, that the republic had been placed by an unfortunate choice in the hands of two consuls of the Tarquinian faction, whose names were subsequently rendered dubious by indulgence or by calumny.

That the name of dictator was of Latin origin, is acknowledged; and assuredly the character of his office, as invested with regal power for a limited period, was no less so: the existence of a dictator at Tusculum in early, at Lavinium in very late times, is matter of history; and from Latin ritual books, which referred to Alban traditions, Macer was enabled to assert that this magistracy had subsisted at Alba; though it is true that the preservation of any historical record concerning Alba is still more out of the question than that of any concerning Rome before Tullus Hostilius.

The Romans have no common national name for the Sabines and the tribes which are supposed to have issued from them: the latter, whether Marsians and Pelignians, or Samnites and Lucanians, they term Sabellians. That these tribes called themselves Savini or Sabini, is nearly certain from the inscription on the Samnite Denarius coined in the Social war; at least as to the Samnites, whose name is in every form manifestly, and in the Greek Σανῖται directly, derived from Savini: but the usage of a people whose writings have perished, like every thing that is extinct in fact, has lost its rights. I think myself at liberty to employ the term Sabellians for the whole race; since the tribes which were so named by the Romans, are far more important than the Sabines; and it would clearly have offended a Latin ear, to have called the Samnites Sabines: for investigations like those of this history a general name is indispensable.

When Rome crossed the frontiers of Latium, the Sabellians were the most widely extended and the greatest people in Italy the Etruscans had already sunk, as they had seen the nations of earlier greatness sink, the Tyrrhenians, Umbrians, and Ausonians. As the Dorians were great in their colonies, the mother-country remaining little; and as it lived in peace, while the tribes it sent forth diffused themselves widely by conquests and settlements; so, according to Cato, was it with the old Sabine nation.

In every state the constitution of which was grounded on a certain number of houses, a commonalty grew up or subsisted by the side of the burghers or of the freeholders. They who belonged to this commonalty, were not only recognized as freemen, but also as fellow-countrymen: they received like succour against foreigners, were under the protection of the laws, might acquire real property, had their motes for making by-laws and their courts, were bound to serve in time of war, but were excluded from the government, which was confined to the houses.

The origin of the commonalty, though exceedingly various, in cities mostly coincides with that of the rights of the pale-burghers; of the dwellers within the pale or the contado: but it increased in extent and still more so in importance, when a city acquired a domain, a distretto, containing towns and a variety of small places. Among the ancients, the inhabitants of such a domain were sometimes taken in a body under the protection of the law and admitted to the rights of freemen; more frequently this was done in the case of such as removed thence into the city: these were persons of very different rank, gentle and simple.