The difficulty is greater when we try to define the characteristics of the Æolians or Æolidæ. They are younger than the Achæans and Ionians, or to speak more precisely, the clans so denominated do not make their appearance until long after the Aquaïousha and Iavanim were well known, not only in the Ægean, but far beyond its sphere; Æolian, unlike Achæan, is not one of the names which Homer indifferently applies, when the verse requires it, to the host assembled before Ilium. Nor do we find in the myths of Æolian heroes the slightest indications of ties which would connect them with Asia. The Asiatic shores may well have been—as in the Argonaut cycle—among the goals toward which heroes loved to steer their boats; but certainly never spots whence they took their departure. All this leads one to think that the appellation was applied to a number of tribes of continental Greece gathered together at a very late period, and not reckoned among Achæan families, whose speech was neither Ionian nor Dorian, and whose sole bond of kinship with each other consisted in their being all descended from the primitive stock of the Pelasgi. This theory is in accord with the etymology current among the Greeks as to the Æolian name: Αἰολεῖς, they said, signified the variegated, the many-coloured ones, e.g. mixed. The name of the Æolians was understood to signify the native Pelasgian tribes, whom the settlement of Asiatic Greeks and intermixture with them had advanced to a higher degree of civilization as husbandmen, navigators, and members of orderly political communities.[1] The greater portions of the populations which fall under this category inhabited coasts where the religion of Poseidon was held in honour, the god that raises and quells the storm. Among the Æolian heroes was ranged Jason, the commander of the ship "Argo." That all these tribes should have spoken dialects which, despite numerous differences, have quite enough analogies in common to have been brought under the generic name of Æolic dialect cannot surprise us, since they are ruled to have all come from the same stock. In this dialect, according to philologists, are included those forms which, when compared with the cognate languages of Asia, must be recognized as the most ancient. The Æolic stands nearest to the original tongue of the Greeks, to that tongue which must be regarded as the common mother of the various dialects—among those of
- ↑ Curtius, Greek History.
