Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/92

 The People. 71 the Graeco- Italic language. Accordingly, it is that which most nearly resembles Latin.^ Both ancient colouring and the undeni- able analogies which are manifest between ^Eolic-Greek and Italian dialects become very plain if we accept the former as but a development of the Pelasgian tongue. Do not the Pelasgi represent the oldest stratum of Aryan population that came to Greece and Italy, and are not their traces found on either shore of the Hadriatic ? Then, too, this notion fits in admirably with the affinities which grammarians point out between ^Eolic and Doric. Like the Pelasgians, the Dorians belong to that portion of the Greek race whose migration, by a land route, extended from north to south in the Hellenic peninsula. The Pelasgians, from whose ranks were to stand out the iEolians, advanced from the very beginning to the southernmost point of the peninsula, and overspread the plains and coasts, where their language lost somewhat of its roughness, whilst their manners softened by contact with the stranger. On the contrary the Dorians remained centuries longer locked up among the high valleys of the central range, where they kept to habits engendered by the labours and privations of a penurious life ; their speech is markedly rougher in its pronunciation, and in its full and broad sounds we recognize **the chest strength- ened by mountain air and mountain life ; " ^ ^Eolic, though softer, has no special character of its own ; it may be said to stand mid-way between Doric and Ionic, but inclining to the former in that it retains aspirate sounds and full, broad vowels. Ionic acquires more liquidity and length of sound by means of vowels sounded one after the other, but with greater softness and less strength. The language, with its exuberance of forms and unrestrained phrase, suggests the same conjecture to the philologist which the historian has reached by another path. This idiom, when disclosed in its oldest monuments, bears unequivocal signs of having already lived longer than any other Greek dialects ; it has become pliant and refined, so as to answer the needs of a society to which trade and navigation had brought a precocious culture, whilst the people on the opposite shores of the Archipelago had scarcely emerged from barbarism. We know what influences were at work in bringing about a more rapid evolution among the tribes established on the ^ CuRTius, Greek History, ^ Ibid,