Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/30

8 several tribes and territories. In what relation the dialects of the Pelasgians, Dryopes, Abantes, Leleges, Epeans, and other races widely diffused in the earliest periods of Grecian history, may have stood to one another, is indeed a question which it would be vain to attempt to answer; but thus much is evident, that the number of these tribes, and their frequent migrations, by mixing and confounding the different races, contributed powerfully to produce that irregularity of structure which characterises the Greek language in its very earliest monuments.

§ 5. The primitive tribes just mentioned, which were the earliest occupants of Greece known to tradition, and of which the , and after them the, were the most extended, unquestionably did much for the first cultivation of the soil, the foundation of insti- tutions for divine worship, and the first establishment of a regular order of society. The Pelasgians, widely scattered over Greece, and having their settlements in the most fertile regions (as the vale of the Peneus in Thessaly, the lower districts of Boeotia, and the plains of Argos and Sicyon), appear, before the time when they wandered through Greece in isolated bodies, as a nation attached to their own dwelling- places, fond of building towns, which they fortified with walls of a colossal size, and zealously worshipping the powers of heaven and earth, which made their fields fruitful and their cattle prosperous. The mythical genealogies of Argos competed as it were with those of Sicyon; and both these cities, by a long chain of patriarchal princes (most of whom are merely personifications of the country, its mountains and rivers), were able to place their origin at a period of the remotest antiquity. The Leleges also (with whom were connected the Locrians in Northern Greece and the Epeans in Peloponnesus), although they had fewer fixed settlements, and appear to have led a rougher and more warlike life—such as still prevailed in the mountainous districts of Northern Greece at the time of the historian Thucydides — yet cele- brated their national heroes, especially Deucalion and his descendants, as founders of cities and temples. But there is no trace of any peculiar creation of the intellect having developed itself among these races, or of any poems in which they displayed any peculiar character; and whe ther it may be possible to discover any characteristic and distinct features in the legends of the gods and heroes who belong to the territories occupied by these different tribes is a question which must be deferred until we come to treat of the origin of the Grecian mythology. It is however much to be lamented that, with our sources of information, it seems impossible to form a well-grounded opinion on the dialects of these ancient tribes of Greece, by which they were doubtless precisely distinguished from one another; and any such attempt appears the more hopeless, as even of the dialects which were spoken in the several territories of Greece within the historical period we have only a scanty knowledge, by means of a few inscriptions and the statements of