7
Thessalus. Thucydides (I 12) says that, sixty years after the fall of Troy, the Boeotians, having been expelled by the Thessalians, took possession of the land, which was now called Boeotia, but which before had been called Cadmeïs, wherein there had previously dwelt a section of their race, which had contributed their contingent to the Trojan war. The latter statement is evidently a makeshift to bring his account into harmony with Homer, who recognizes the Boeotians as inhabitants of Boeotia. The account of Pausanias varies from that of Thucydides in that he relegates the immigration of the Boeotians to a period anterior to the Trojan war, and Ephorus states that the invading force was composed of the Boeotians from Arne, and af Cadmeans who had been expelled from Boeotia by the Thracians and Pelasgians. The theory of Thucydides that the Boeotians in their ingression from Thessaly into Boeotia were returning to their ancestral dwelling-place is evidently an invention, coined in the workshop of fiction, and failing to show that the Boeotians were of Aeolic stock. A similar inversion of historical fact is seen in the legend that the Aetolians “returned” to Elis at the time of the retarn of the Heraclidae. The atmosphere which Greek historians breathed was surcharged with “returns” of expatriated tribes.
Though tradition is adduced pointing to an invading force of Aeolic blood, and though it has been assumed that this force was successful in subduing a Doric race in Boeotia, traces of whose language worked their way into the speech of the conquerors, it cannot be said that these suppositions have either been made convincing or even possible. According to Brand, the latest writer on the subject, all those Dorisms which appear in the Boeotian dialect are either survivals of the Doric speech of the conquered inhabitants, or are importations from the neighboring communities to the west. Whatever may be said of the plausibility of the latter assertion, which will not be overlooked later on, the grotesque ingenuousness of his argument that, because in all the cantons of Northern Greece, except that of Thessaly, at the time of Alexander the Great, there obtained a dialect which presents the same general Doric characteristics, therefore such must have been the case in prehistoric times, needs no refutation.[1] Inasmuch as all previous
- ↑ The substructure of Brand’s theory of a pan-Aeolic dialect is constructed of the flimsy materials of gratuitous assumption and a marvellous readiness to take refuge in that most pliable of arguments—the argumentum ex silentio.
