Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/351

 ACH.EANS IN PELOPONXLSUS. 335 Of the preexisting inhabitants of Laconia and Messenia, whom we are accustomed to call Achaeans and Pylians, so little is known, that we cannot at all measure the difference between them and their Dorian invaders, either in dialect, in habits, or in intelligence. There appear no traces of any difference of dialect among the various parts of the population of Laconia : the Mes- senian allies of Athens, in the Peloponnesian war, speak the same dialect as the Helots, and the same also as the Ambrakiotic colo- nists from Corinth : all Doric. 1 Nor are we to suppose that the Doric dialect was at all peculiar to the people called Dorians. As far as can be made out by the evidence of Inscriptions, it seems to have been the dialect of the Phokians, Delphians, Lo- krians, JEtolians, and Achteans of Phthiotis : with respect to the latter, the Inscriptions of Thaumaki, in Achaea Phthiotis, afford a proof the more curious and the more cogent of native dialect, because the Phthiots were both immediate neighbors and sub- jects of the Thessalians, who spoke a variety of the .ZEolic. So, too, within Peloponnesus, we find evidences of Doric dialect among the Achaeans in the north of Peloponnesus, the Dryo- pic inhabitants of Hermione, 2 and the Eleuthero-Lacones, or Laconian townships (compounded of Perioeki and Helots), eman- cipated by the Romans in the second century B. c. Concerning the speech of that population whom the invading Dorians found in Laconia, we have no means of judging^ the presumption would rather be that it did not differ materially from the Do- ric. Thucydides designates the Corinthians, whom the invading Dorians attacked from the hill Solygeius, as being JEolians, and Strabo speaks both of the Achaeans as an JEolic nation, and of the JE-oliic dialect as having been originally preponderant iin Peloponnesus. 3 But we do not readily see what means of in formation either of these authors possessed respecting the speech of a time which must have been four centuries anterior even to Thucydides. Of that which is called the jEolic dialect there are three 1 Thucyd. iii. 112 : iv. 41 : compare vii. 44, about the sameness of sound tf the war-shout, or pscan, as delivered by all the different Dorians. 4 Corpus Jnscript. Boeckh. Nos. 1771, 1772. 1773; Ahrens, De Dialecio JJoricA, sect. i-ii. 48. 3 Thucyd. iv. 42 : Strabo. viii. p. 333.