Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/40

12 Greeks, but of the Trojans, and come from Larisa, near Cyme, in Asia Minor. They are, again, only one of four divisions of the inhabitants of Crete, and their name only lingers as an epithet of Zeus in the ancient oracle of Dodona. But though the Greeks are no longer Pelasgoi, neither are they as yet Hellenes. To Homer the Hellenes are only a small tribe in Thessaly. He calls the Greeks Achaioi or Argeioi or Danaoi. But when Hesiod wrote Greece was Hellas, and the Greeks Hellenes.

It would seem, then, that the Homeric poems were composed in the interval between the time when the Achaeans superseded the Pelasgians as the dominant people, and the time when the Hellenes in like manner superseded the Achaeans. Yet Homer was Hellenic in many points: in his language, which was understood throughout Greece, and remained more intelligible to a man of the age of Pericles than Chaucer to an Englishman of the eighteenth century; in the form of government which he implies, with king, council, and a rudimentary assembly which reappear in most Greek states. The Homeric Greece, on the other hand, differs widely from what we know of it under the Hellenes. The greater divisions of the country seem not to have obtained the names by which they were known in after times. There is no general name for the Peloponnese, unless it be “Argos” in the Odyssey. Thessaly, Epirus, Acarnania, Macedonia, are unknown names. Sparta and Athens occur, but not Lacedaemon or Attica. None of the Greek towns in Asia are mentioned except Miletus. Sicily is not known to the Iliad,