Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 1 of 3: I. Prolegomena II. Achæis; or, the Ethnology of the Greek RacesGladstone, W. E. (William Ewart)
History
Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. 1 of 3: I. Prolegomena II. Achæis; or, the Ethnology of the Greek Races
Gladstone, W. E. (William Ewart)
Civilization, Homeric; Epic poetry, Greek -- History and criticism; Homer
I propose to inquire what evidence can be drawn, either from
philological sources, or from the text of Homer, to throw light on the
several pursuits and tendencies of these races, under the heads of
Religion, Policy, War, the Games, Poetry, the Chase, and Navigation.
Under some of these heads, however, we must in a measure anticipate
results which will be only obtained in full from later inquiries.
The Poems afford us no complete and decisive test for discriminating
between the Hellene and the Pelasgian contributions respectively to the
Greek religion.
We shall, however, hereafter find many details of evidence bearing upon
this subject.
For the present I must confine myself to two very general propositions,
which are founded on the relations of the Greek religion with those of
Troy and of Italy.
First, there seems to be a presumption, which may weigh with us to
a certain extent in the absence of counter-evidence, that those
parts of the Greek religion which were common to the Greeks with the
Trojans were Pelasgian, and that those which were not common, were not
Pelasgian. But of the parts which were common, and therefore Pelasgian,
many may have been originally Hellene too.
Again, a relationship subsists between Greece and Italy, as to the
component parts of their respective populations, which, without being
unduly strained, will throw considerable light upon the question of
Hellic and Pelasgic attributes.
The Greek or the Italian of the classic times could not be expected
to own relationship with what lay to the northward, on each of those
two peninsulas. The Roman, therefore, whose investigations led him
to suppose there were Pelasgians in Italy, would only derive them
from Greece. For us the case stands far otherwise; and we must simply
consider the Pelasgians of Greece, and the Pelasgians of Italy, as two
among a variety of branches, which struck out at different times from
the main trunk of an extended race, probably diffusing itself over
many parts of Asia and Europe. In Greece and Italy respectively these
Pelasgic tribes entered into new combinations, probably not wholly
different, nor, on the other hand, by any means in exact correspondence.
We may perhaps be found not to go beyond the limits of the modesty
which the case requires, when we simply lay down this rule: that
correspondences in religion or in language between Greece and ancient
Italy raise a presumption, that those features of each country, in
which the correspondence is observed, are of Pelasgic origin.
Something of such correspondence we may perceive in regard to religion.
The religion of Homeric Greece differs from that of Rome, not only
as to minor deities, but in the names given to many of the greater
deities, and especially in the far more imaginative character of its
traditions.
Those parts of the religion of Greece and Rome which were common to
both were probably Pelasgian.
Let us take first the names which correspond, and then those which are
different.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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