History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed/Chapter I
CHAPTER I.
§ 1. General account of the languages of the Indo-Teutonic family.—§ 2. Origin and formation of the Indo-Teutonic languages—multiplicity of their grammatical forms—§ 3. Characteristics of the Greek language, as compared with the other languages of the Indo-Teutonic family.—§ 4. Variety of forms, inflexions, and dialects in the Greek language.—§ 5. The tribes of Greece, and their several dialects—characteristics of each dialect.
§ 1. Language, the earliest product of the human mind, and the origin of all other intellectual energies, is at the same time the clearest evidence of the descent of a nation and of its affinity with other races. Hence the comparison of languages enables us to judge of the history of nations at periods to which no other kind of memorial, no tradition or record, can ascend. In modern times, this subject has been studied with more comprehensive views and more systematic methods than formerly: and from these researches it appears that a large part of the nations of the ancient world formed a family, whose languages (besides a large number of radical words, to which we need not here particularly advert) had on the whole the same grammatical structure and the same forms of derivation and inflexion. The nations between which this affinity subsisted are—the Indians, whose language, in its earliest and purest form, is preserved in the Sanscrit; the Persians, whose primitive language, the Zend, is closely allied with the Sanscrit; the Armenians and Phrygians, kindred races, of whose language the modern Armenian is a very mutilated remnant, though a few ancient features preserved in it still show its original resemblance; the Greek nation, of which the Latin people is a branch; the Sclavonian races, who, notwithstanding their intellectual inferiority, appear from their language to be nearly allied with the Persians and other cognate nations; the Lettic tribes, among which the Lithuanian has preserved the fundamental forms of this class of languages with remarkable fidelity; the Teutonic, and, lastly, the Celtic races, whose language (so far as we can judge from the very degenerate remains of it now extant), though deviating widely in some respects from the general character perceptible in the other languages, yet unquestionably belongs to the same family. It is remarkable that this family of languages, which, possess the highest perfection of grammatical structure, also includes a larger number of nations, and has spread over a wider extent of surface, than any other: the Semitic family (to which the Hebrew, Syrian, Phœnician, Arabian, and other languages belong), though in many respects it can compete with the Indo-Germanic, is inferior to it in the perfection of its structure and its capacity for literary development; in respect of its diffusion likewise it approaches the Indian class of languages, without being equal to it; while, again, the rude and meagre languages of the American aborigines are often confined to a very narrow district, and appear to have no affinity with those of the other tribes in the immediate vicinity[1]. Hence, perhaps, it may be inferred, that the higher capacity for the formation and development of language was at this early period combined with a greater physical and mental energy—in short, with all those qualities on which the ulterior improvement and increase of the nations by which it was spoken depended.
While the Semitic branch occupies the south-west of Asia, the Indo-Germanic languages run in a straight line from south-east to north-west, through Asia and Europe: a slight interruption, which occurs in the country between the Euphrates and Asia Minor, appears to have been occasioned by the pressure of Semitic or Syrian races from the south; for it seems probable that originally the members of this national family succeeded one another in a continuous line, although we are not now able to trace the source from which this mighty stream originally flowed. Equally uncertain is it whether these languages were spoken by the earliest inhabitants of the countries to which they belonged, or were introduced by subsequent immigrations; in which latter case the rude aborigines would have adopted the principal features of the language spoken by the more highly endowed race, retaining at the same time much of their original dialect—an hypothesis which appears highly probable as regards those languages which show a general affinity with the others, but nevertheless differ from them widely in their grammatical structure and the number of their radical forms.
§ 2. On the other hand, this comparison of languages leads to many results, with respect to the intellectual state of the Greek people, which throw an unexpected light into quarters where the eye of the historian has hitherto been able to discover nothing but darkness. We reject as utterly untenable the notion that the savages of Greece, from the inarticulate cries by which they expressed their animal wants, and from the sounds by which they sought to imitate the impressions of outward objects, gradually arrived at the harmonious and magnificent language which we admire in the poems of Homer. So far is this hypothesis from the truth, that language evidently is connected with the power of abstracting or of forming general notions, and is inconsistent with the absence of this faculty. It is plain that the most abstract parts of speech, those least likely to arise from the imitation of any outward impression, were the first which obtained a permanent form; and hence those parts of speech appear most clearly in all the languages of the Indo-Teutonic family. Among these are the verb "to be," the forms of which seem to alternate in the Sanscrit, the Lithuanian, and the Greek; the pronouns, which denote the most general relations of persons and things to the speaker; the numerals, also abstract terms, altogether independent of impressions from single objects; and, lastly, the grammatical forms, by which the actions expressed by verbs are referred to the speaker, and the objects expressed by nouns are placed in the most various relations to one another. The luxuriance of grammatical forms which we perceive in the Greek cannot have been of late introduction, but must be referred to the earliest period of the language; for we find traces of nearly all of them in the cognate tongues, which could not have been the case unless the languages before they diverged had possessed these forms in common: thus the distinction between aorist tenses, which represent an action as a moment, as a single point, and others, which represent it as continuous, like a prolonged line, occurs in Sanscrit as well as in Greek.
In general it may be observed, that in the lapse of ages, from the time that the progress of language can be observed, grammatical forms, such as the signs of cases, moods, and tenses, have never been increased in number, but have been constantly diminishing. The history of the Romance, as well as of the Germanic, languages, shows in the clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and copious, has been gradually weakened and impoverished, until at last it preserves only a few fragments of its ancient inflections. The ancient languages, especially the Greek, fortunately still retained the chief part of their grammatical forms at the time of their literary development; thus, for example, little was lost in the progress of the Greek language from Homer to the Athenian orators. Now there is no doubt that this luxuriance of grammatical forms is not an essential part of a language, considered merely as a vehicle of thought. It is well known that the Chinese language, which is merely a collection of radical words destitute of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical ideas with tolerable precision; and the English, which, from the mode of its formation by a mixture of different tongues, has been stripped of its grammatical inflections more completely than any other European language, seems nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be distinguished by its energetic eloquence. All this must be admitted by every unprejudiced inquirer; but yet it cannot be overlooked, that this copiousness of grammatical forms, and the fine shades of meaning which they express, evince a nicety of observation and a faculty of distinguishing, which unquestionably prove that the race of mankind among whom these languages arose was characterized by a remarkable correctness and subtlety of thought. Nor can any modern European, who forms in his mind a lively image of the classical languages in their ancient grammatical luxuriance, and compares them with his mother tongue, conceal from himself that in the ancient languages the words, with their inflections, clothed as it were with muscles and sinews, come forward like living bodies, full of expression and character; while in the modern tongues the words seem shrunk up into mere skeletons. Another advantage which belongs to the fulness of grammatical forms is, that words of similar signification make likewise a similar impression on the ear; whence each sentence obtains a certain symmetry and, even where the collocation of the words is involved, a clearness and regularity, which may be compared with the effect produced on the eye by the parts of a well-proportioned building; whereas, in the languages which have lost their grammatical forms, either the lively expression of the feeling is hindered by an unvarying and monotonous collocation of the words, or the hearer is compelled to strain his attention, in order to comprehend the mutual relation of the several parts of the sentence. Modern languages seem to attempt to win their way at once to the understanding without dwelling in the ear; while the classical languages of antiquity seek at the same time to produce a corresponding effect on the outward sense, and to assist the mind by previously filling the ear, as it were, with an imperfect consciousness of the meaning sought to be conveyed by the words.
§ 3. These remarks apply generally to the languages of the Indo-Germanic family, so far as they have been preserved in a state of integrity by literary works and have been cultivated by poets and orators. We shall now limit our regards to the Greek language alone, and shall attempt to exhibit its more prominent and characteristic features as compared with those of its sister tongues. In the sounds which were formed by the various articulation of the voice, the Greek language hits that happy medium which characterises all the mental productions of this people, in being equally removed, on the one hand, from the superabundant fulness, and, on the other, from the meagreness and tenuity of sound, by which other languages are variously deformed. If we compare the Greek with that language which comes next to it in fitness for a lofty and flowing style of poetry, viz., the Sanscrit, this latter certainly has some clashes of consonants not to be found in the Greek, the sounds of which it is almost impossible for an European mouth to imitate and distinguish: on the other hand, the Greek is much richer in short vowels than the Sanscrit, whose most harmonious poetry would weary our ears by the monotonous repetition of the A sound; and it possesses an astonishing abundance of diphthongs, and tones produced by the contraction of vowels, which a Greek mouth could alone distinguish with the requisite nicety, and which, therefore, are necessarily confounded by the modern European pronunciation. We may likewise perceive in the Greek the influence of the laws of harmony, which, in different nations, have caused the rejection of different combinations of vowels and consonants, and which have increased the softness and beauty of languages, though sometimes at the expense of their terminations and characteristic features. By the operation of the latter cause, the Greek has, in many places, lost its resemblance to the original type, which, although not now preserved in any one of the extant languages, maybe restored by conjecture from all of them; even here, however, it cannot be denied that the correct taste and feeling of the Greeks led them to a happy mixture of the consonant and vowel sounds, by which strength has been reconciled with softness, and harmony with strongly marked peculiarities; while the language has, at the same time, in its multifarious dialects, preserved a variety of sound and character, which fit it for the most discordant kinds of poetical and prose composition.
§ 4. We must not pass over one important characteristic of the Greek language, which is closely connected with the early condition of the Greek nation, and which may be considered as, in some degree, prefiguring the subsequent character of its civilisation. In order to convey an adequate idea of our meaning, we will ask any person who is acquainted with Greek, to recal to his mind the toils and fatigue which he underwent in mastering the forms of the language, and the difficulty which he found to impress them on his memory; when his mind, vainly attempting to discover a reason for such anomalies, was almost in despair at finding that so large a number of verbs derive their tenses from the most various roots; that one verb uses only the first, another only the second, aorist, and that even the individual persons of the aorist are sometimes compounded of the forms of the first and second aorists respectively; and that many verbs and substantives have retained only single or a few forms, which have been left standing by themselves, like the remains of a past age. The convulsions and catastrophes of which we see so many traces around us in the frame-work of the world have not been confined to external nature alone. The structure of languages also has evidently, in ages prior to the existence of any literature, suffered some violent shocks, which may, perhaps, have received their impulse from migrations or internal discord; and the elements of the language, having been thrown in confusion together, were afterwards re-arranged, and combined into a new whole. Above all is this true of the Greek language, which bears strong marks of having originally formed part of a great and regular plan, and of having been reconstructed on a new system from the fragments of the former edifice. The same is doubtless also the cause of the great variety of dialects which existed both anions the Greeks and the neighbouring nations;—a variety, of which mention is made at so early a date as the Homeric poems[2]. As the country inhabited by the Greeks is intersected to a remarkable degree by mountains and sea, and thus was unfitted by Nature to serve as the habitation of a uniform population, collected in large states, like the plains of the Euphrates and Ganges; and as, for this reason, the Greek people was divided into a number of separate tribes, some of which attract our attention in the early fabulous age, others in the later historical period; so likewise the Greek language was divided, to an unexampled extent, into various dialects, which differed from each other according to the several tribes and territories. In what relation the dialects of the Pelasgians, Dryopes, Abantes, Leleges, Epeans, and other races widely diffused in the earliest periods of Grecian history, may have stood to one another, is indeed a question which it would be vain to attempt to answer; but thus much is evident, that the number of these tribes, and their frequent migrations, by mixing and confounding the different races, contributed powerfully to produce that irregularity of structure which characterises the Greek language in its very earliest monuments.
§ 5. The primitive tribes just mentioned, which were the earliest occupants of Greece known to tradition, and of which the Pelasgians, and after them the Leleges, were the most extended, unquestionably did much for the first cultivation of the soil, the foundation of insti- tutions for divine worship, and the first establishment of a regular order of society. The Pelasgians, widely scattered over Greece, and having their settlements in the most fertile regions (as the vale of the Peneus in Thessaly, the lower districts of Boeotia, and the plains of Argos and Sicyon), appear, before the time when they wandered through Greece in isolated bodies, as a nation attached to their own dwelling- places, fond of building towns, which they fortified with walls of a colossal size, and zealously worshipping the powers of heaven and earth, which made their fields fruitful and their cattle prosperous. The mythical genealogies of Argos competed as it were with those of Sicyon; and both these cities, by a long chain of patriarchal princes (most of whom are merely personifications of the country, its mountains and rivers), were able to place their origin at a period of the remotest antiquity. The Leleges also (with whom were connected the Locrians in Northern Greece and the Epeans in Peloponnesus), although they had fewer fixed settlements, and appear to have led a rougher and more warlike life—such as still prevailed in the mountainous districts of Northern Greece at the time of the historian Thucydides — yet cele- brated their national heroes, especially Deucalion and his descendants, as founders of cities and temples. But there is no trace of any peculiar creation of the intellect having developed itself among these races, or of any poems in which they displayed any peculiar character; and whe ther it may be possible to discover any characteristic and distinct features in the legends of the gods and heroes who belong to the territories occupied by these different tribes is a question which must be deferred until we come to treat of the origin of the Grecian mythology. It is however much to be lamented that, with our sources of information, it seems impossible to form a well-grounded opinion on the dialects of these ancient tribes of Greece, by which they were doubtless precisely distinguished from one another; and any such attempt appears the more hopeless, as even of the dialects which were spoken in the several territories of Greece within the historical period we have only a scanty knowledge, by means of a few inscriptions and the statements of grammarians, wherever they had not obtained a literary cultivation and celebrity by the labours of poets and prose writers.
Of more influence, however, on the development of the intellectual faculties of the Greeks was the distinction of the tribes and their dialects, established at a period which, from the domination of war- like and conquering races and the consequent prevalence of a bold spirit of enterprise, was called the heroic age. It is at this time, before the migration of the Dorians into Peloponnesus and the settlements in Asia Minor, that the seeds must have been sown of an opposition between the races and dialects of Greece, which exercised the most important influence on the state of civil society, and thus on the direction of the mental energies of the people, of their poetry, art, and literature. If we consider the dialects of the Greek language, with which we are ac- quainted by means of its literary monuments, they appear to fall into two great classes, which are distinguished from each other by characteristic marks. The one class is formed by the Æolic dialect; a name, indeed, under which the Greek grammarians included dialects very different from one another, as in later times everything was comprehended under the term Æolic, which was not Ionic, Attic, or Doric. According to this acceptation of the term about three-fourths of the Greek nation consisted of Æolians, and dialects were classed together as Æolic which (as is evident from the more ancient inscriptions) differed more from one another than from the Doric; as, for example, the Thessalian and Ætolian, the Bœotian and Elean dialects. The Æolians, however, properly so called (who occur in mythology under this appellation), lived at this early period in the plain of Thessaly, south of the Peneus, which was afterwards called Thessaliotis, and from thence as far as the Paga- setic Bay. We also find in the same mythical age a branch of the Æolian race, in southern Ætolia, in possession of Calydon; this frag- ment of the Æolians, however, afterwards disappears from history, while the Æolians of Thessaly, who also bore the name of Bœotians, two generations after the Trojan war, migrated into the country which was called after them Boeotia, and from thence, soon afterwards, mixed with other races, to the maritime districts and islands of Asia Minor, which from that time forward received the name of Æolis in Asia Minor[3]. It is in this latter Æolis that we become acquainted with the Æolian dialect, through the lyric poets of the Lesbian school, the origin and character of which will be explained in a subsequent chapter. On the whole it may be said of this dialect, as of the Bœotian in its earlier form, that it bears an archaic character, and approaches nearest to the source of the Greek language; hence the Latin, as being connected with the most ancient form of the Greek, has a close affinity with it, and in general the agreement with the other languages of the Indo-Germanic family is always most perceptible in the Æolic. A mere variety of the Æolic was the dialect of the Doric race, which originally was confined to a narrow district in Northern Greece, but was afterwards spread over the Peloponnesus and other regions by that important movement of population which was called the Return of the Heracleids. It is characterized by strength and breadth, as shown in its fondness for simple open vowel sounds, and its aversion for sibilants. Much more different from the original type is the other leading dialect of the Greek language, the Ionic, which took its origin in the mother-country, and was by the Ionic colonies, which sailed from Athens, carried over to Asia Minor, where it underwent still further changes. Its characteristics are softness and liquidness of sound, arising chiefly from the concurrence of vowels, among which, not the broad a and o, but the thinner sounds of e and u, were most prevalent; among the consonants the tendency to the use of s is most discernible. It may be observed, that wherever the Ionic dialect differs either in vowels or consonants from the Æolic, it also differs from the original type, as may be discovered by a comparison of the cognate languages; it must therefore be considered as a peculiar form of the Greek, which was developed within the limits of the Grecian territory. It is probable that this dialect was spoken not only by the Ionians, but also, at least one very similar, by the ancient Achæans; since the Achæans in the genealogical legends concerning the descendants of Hellen are represented as the brothers of the Ionians: this hypothesis would also explain how the ancient epic poems, in which the Ionians are scarcely mentioned, but the Achæan race plays the principal part, were written in a dialect which, though differing in many respects from the genuine Ionic, has yet the closest resemblance to it.
Even from these first outlines of the history of the Greek dialects we might be led to expect that those features would be developed in the institutions and literature of the several races which we find in their actual history. In the Æolic and Doric tribes we should be prepared to find the order of society regulated by those ancient customs and principles which had been early established among the Greeks; their dialects at least show a strong disposition to retain the archaic forms, without much tendency to refinement. Among the Dorians, however, every thing is more strongly expressed, and comes forward in a more prominent light than among the Æolians; and as their dialect everywhere prefers the broad, strong, and rough tones, and introduces them throughout with unbending regularity, so we might naturally look among them for a disposition to carry a spirit of austerity and of reverence for ancient custom through the entire frame of civil and private society. The Ionians, on the other hand, show even in their dialect a strong tendency to modify ancient forms according to their taste and humour, together with a constant endeavour to polish and refine, which was doubtless the cause why this dialect, although of later date and of secondary origin, was first employed in finished poetical compositions.
- ↑ Some of the American languages are rather cumbersome than meagre in their grammmatical forms; and some are much more widely spread than others.—Note by Editor.
- ↑ In Iliad, ii. 804, and iv. 437, there is mention of the variety of dialects among the allies of the Trojans; and in Odyssey, xix. 175, among the Greek tribes in Crete.
- ↑ We here only reckon those Æolians who were in fact considered as belonging to the Æolian race, and not all the tribes which were ruled by heroes, whom Hesiod, in the fragment of the ἠοῖαι, calls sons of Æolus; although this genealogy justifies us in assuming a close affinity between those races, which is also confirmed by other testimonies. In this sense the Minyans of Orchomenus and Iolcus, ruled by the Æolids Athamas and Cretheus, were of Æolian origin; a nation which, by the stability of its political institutions, its spirit of enterprise, even for maritime expeditions, and its colossal buildings, holds a pre-eminent rank among the tribes of the mythical age of Greece. (See Hesiod, Fragm. 28, ed. Gaisford.)