On the Early Kings of Attica. 367 'fltorm into 'Ifjovia or 'laopia^ and how destitute of all his- torical authority are the legends about Ion the grandson of Hellen, we shall perhaps regard this as a much more probable origin of the name. It corresponds with 'ALytdXeia^ which part of the same region bore ; a name which the mythologists referred to an ^Egialeus, with as little scruple as Ionia to Ion, notwithstanding its palpable derivation from diyiaX6<^. Perhaps it will not be venturing too far into the regions of etymological conjecture to suggest that even the name 'Ava/a^ which in the historic times this same country bore, is of similar meaning. A root answering to the Latin aqua pro- bably existed in the Greek ; we trace it in A^eXcSo? and
- A')(€p(Dv. This etymology of 'A')(^aca suits equally with the
position of the Thessalian Achaea, and a similarity of name, though arising from similarity of site, was quite suffi- cient to give rise to the story of a colony from the one to the other. Strabo and Apollodorus make Ach^eus and Ion brothers ; and Herodotus, by considering the Achseans as autochthones in the Peloponnesus, virtually contradicts the story of a migration from Pthiotis. Whatever may be thought of this conjecture, it seems to me that by as- signing to the lonians an existence coeval with the earliest times of Grecian tradition, we extricate ourselves from a very great difficulty, arising from the mention of Javan in the book of Genesis x. 2. In the age of Moses there were no Ionian colonies in Asia, and the Ion of the mytholo- gists was not born ; even in the age of David the pilgrim fathers of these flourishing republics had but just set foot on its shores, and could not have given them a name, But if the lonians were a widely extended tribe, autoch- thones on the northern and eastern limits of the Pelopon- nesus, in Attica, and Boeotia, their name might very well be used, even in the age of Moses, for southern Greece, as that of Hellas (Elisha) for northern Greece. This implies of course that Hellas had a much wider extent in early times than we, judging from the Homeric limitation of it, which is probably an archaism of poetry, commonly suppose^ 26 26 The supposition that the Achaean and South Boeotian dialect was the same as the old Ionic and Attic, consequently in the main the same as the epic, would remove many difficulties in the history of the Greek language and literature. Vol. II. No. 5. 3 A
