Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/31

Rh wherever they had not obtained a literary cultivation and celebrity by the labours of poets and prose writers.

Of more influence, however, on the development of the intellectual faculties of the Greeks was the distinction of the tribes and their dialects, established at a period which, from the domination of war- like and conquering races and the consequent prevalence of a bold spirit of enterprise, was called the heroic age. It is at this time, before the migration of the Dorians into Peloponnesus and the settlements in Asia Minor, that the seeds must have been sown of an opposition between the races and dialects of Greece, which exercised the most important influence on the state of civil society, and thus on the direction of the mental energies of the people, of their poetry, art, and literature. If we consider the dialects of the Greek language, with which we are ac- quainted by means of its literary monuments, they appear to fall into two great classes, which are distinguished from each other by characteristic marks. The one class is formed by the Æolic dialect; a name, indeed, under which the Greek grammarians included dialects very different from one another, as in later times everything was comprehended under the term Æolic, which was not Ionic, Attic, or Doric. According to this acceptation of the term about three-fourths of the Greek nation consisted of Æolians, and dialects were classed together as Æolic which (as is evident from the more ancient inscriptions) differed more from one another than from the Doric; as, for example, the Thessalian and Ætolian, the Bœotian and Elean dialects. The Æolians, however, properly so called (who occur in mythology under this appellation), lived at this early period in the plain of Thessaly, south of the Peneus, which was afterwards called Thessaliotis, and from thence as far as the Paga- setic Bay. We also find in the same mythical age a branch of the Æolian race, in southern Ætolia, in possession of Calydon; this frag- ment of the Æolians, however, afterwards disappears from history, while the Æolians of Thessaly, who also bore the name of Bœotians, two generations after the Trojan war, migrated into the country which was called after them Boeotia, and from thence, soon afterwards, mixed with other races, to the maritime districts and islands of Asia Minor, which from that time forward received the name of Æolis in Asia Minor. It is in this latter Æolis that we become acquainted with the Æolian dialect, through the lyric poets of the Lesbian school, the origin and character of which will be explained in a subsequent chapter. On the