Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/431

 KPIKOTS. - MACEDONIANS. 415 among the Epirotic Thcsprotians : the ubiquitous name Pelasirian is connected both with one and with the other. This ethnical affinity, remote or near, between CEnotrians and Epirots, which we must accept as a fact without being able to follow it into detail, consists at the same time with the circumstance, that botli seem to have been susceptible of Hellenic influences to an unusual degree, and to have been moulded, with comparatively little difficulty, into an imperfect Hellenism, like that of the ^Etolians and Akarnanians. The Thesprotian conquerors of Thessaly passed in this manner into Thessalian Greeks, and the Amphilochians who inhabited Argos on the Ambrakian gulf, were Hellenized by the reception of Greeks from Ambrakia, though the Amphilochians situated without the city, still re- mained barbarous in the time of Thucydides :' a century after- wards, probably, they would be Hellenized, like the rest, by a longer continuance of the same influences, as happened with the Sikels in Sicily. To assign the names and exact boundaries of the different tribes inhabiting Epirus, as they stood in the seventh and sixth centuries u. c., at the time when the western stream of Grecian colonization was going on, and when the newly established Am- brakiots must have been engaged in subjugating or expelling the prior occupants of their valuable site, is out of our power. We have no information prior to Herodotus and Thucydides, and that which they tell us cannot be safely applied to a time either much earlier or much later than their own. That there was great analogy between the inland Macedonians and the Epi rots, from Mount Bermius across the continent to the coast oppo- site Korkyra, in military equipment, in the fashion of cutting the hair, and in speech, we are apprized by a valuable passage of Strabo ; who farther tells us, that many of the tribes spoke two different languages, 2 a fact which at least, proves very close 1 Thucyd. ii. 68. tncnt of the present day, such is the mixture and intercourse of Greeks, Albanians, Bulgaria Sclavonians, Wallachians, and Turks, that most of the natives find themselves under the necessity of acquiring two, sometimei three, languages : see Dr. Grisebach, Keise durch Rumelien und nach Brass*, ch. xii, vol. ii, p. 68.
 * Strabo, vii, p. 324. In these same regions, under the Turkish govern