Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/68

56 In Attica and Etruria before history begins, we have traces and traditions of an earlier civilized race of whose nationality and character we can now only form a judgment from their remains. The Athenians in later times vaunted themselves as autochthones, yet they could give no account of the first working of the mines that were open before them, nor of the early cultivation of their fields, nor even of the stupendous buildings in ruins around them which they called Cyclopean; and while repudiating their Ionian origin, denied the source of their superior civilization. We are so much in the habit of looking on Grecian art and genius as the perfection of human attainments, that we forget to take into account how small a part of Greece was so distinguishable, or the sources whence that knowledge was originally derived. Those who have written volumes on Athens have ascribed her superiority to a variety of causes omitting perhaps the only true one. This was the fact that the people there were more of a mixed race, formed partly of former colonists probably of Phœnician or some cognate origin, workers of mines and masters of commerce, who thus with additional knowledge and energy, enabled after generations to surpass the other Greeks in all the arts of civilized life. In all these we are told the Athenians were the first instructors of the rest of their countrymen. According to Plutarch "the Athenians taught the Greeks to sow breadcorn, to avail themselves of the use of wells and of the benefit of fire." These are according to our notions the first requirements of life, and if the assertion be true it proves the rest of Greece to have been at the time in a state of abject barbarism; and then the question arises how came the Athenians to be so much superior to the rest of their countrymen. In the rocky districts of Attica, the sowing of breadcorn could not be supposed to have been suggested as naturally as in the fertile fields of Bœotia, nor the use of wells to have been first adopted in a land where streams of water abounded. We might from these considerations alone conclude that such primary arts of life must therefore have been introduced into Attica by some foreign colonists, and had thence been extended over the rest of Greece, leaving us to conjecture, in the uncertainty of history or tradition, the origin of those colonists.

In the same manner with respect to the Etruscans, a like explanation gives an easy and natural solution for the extraordinary evidences they have left of a high state of civilization, to which Rome herself owed the best of her institutions. It might be as Niebuhr writes that "the Italian national migrations like those of Greece came down from the