Subject, then, to the correctness of the Italian hypothesis, what was the native stock of Hellas? Pelasgic. What means this? The proper place for this inquiry is the chapter on the ethnology of Turkey, for in two Turkish localities only have any Pelasgi existed within the historical period. A negative statement, however, will find place here. Whatever the Pelasgi were, they were not, at one and the same time, the earliest occupants of Hellas, and a population belonging to the same class with the Hellenes. The reasons which lie against making the Hellenes aboriginal to Greece lie also against any other Hellenoeid population.
The magnitude of the earliest historical Hellenic area is of importance. Let Greece under the leadership of Agamemnon be as truly Hellenic as Kent and Essex were Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. What does it prove in the way of the occupants being aboriginal? As little as the English character of the counties in question at the time referred to. Four centuries--or even less--of migration may easily have given us all the phenomena that occur; for the area is smaller than the kingdom of Wessex, or Northumberland, and the country but little more impracticable.
Hence, if we sufficiently recognise the smallness of the Hellenic area, no difficulties against the doctrine of an original non-Hellenic population will arise on the score of its magnitude. It was as easily convertible from non-Hellenic to Hellenic as Cumberland and Northumberland have been from British to English.
And that that area was actually very small indeed is evident to any inquirer who will take up the measure of it without any prepossessions in favour of its magnitude, and limit his Hellas to those parts only which can be shown to have been Greek; in order to do which he must draw no undue inferences in favour of the identity of the Hellenic and Phrygian languages from the negative fact of Homer saying nothing about interpreters; build nothing on the ubiquity of the Pelasgi, every one of whose migrations is as unsupported by historical evidence, as the migration of Æneas to Italy, or that of Antenor to Venice; and, lastly, satisfy himself with the “Catalogue of the Ships,” as the earliest geographical notice of ancient Greece. I think that this list is more likely to contain populations which were not Hellenic than to omit any that were; and, with the single exception of the Acarnanians, I imagine that this is the current opinion. The Acarnanians alone of all the Hellenes are said to have taken no part in the Trojan war; and on the strength of their non-intervention we hear of them some nine hundred years afterwards, putting in a claim for the good offices of the Romans, the supposed descendants of those Trojans whom the other Hellenes so cruelly conquered, and the Acarnanians so generously left alone. Yet it by no means follows that because the Acarnanians were Greeks during the Peloponnesian war, they were Greeks in the ninth century B.C., any more than it follows that because the men of Monmouth are English at the present moment they were so during the heptarchy. What should we say to the writer who, in the reign of Queen Victoria, should say that the only people of England who took no part in the wars of the Saxons against the Britons were the Cornishmen? Surely we should accuse him of an anachronism, and suggest the fact of his Cornishmen having been at the time in question, no Saxons at all, but _Britons_. The same reason applies to the statements concerning the Acarnanians; inasmuch as it is highly probable that they are absent from the Homeric list of Greeks, because they were other than Greek in respect to their nationality. It was only when the Greek frontier extended itself northwards that they became Hellenized. Then, too, it was that the later writers who fancied that they must always have been what they were in their own days, superadded the doctrine of their having been Hellenic to the fact of their non-appearance in the Homeric catalogue. For it must be remembered that, even in the third century B.C.--nay even at the present moment--the Acarnanians are a frontier population, in contact with the non-Hellenic Illyrians of old, and the non-Hellenic Skipetars of the nineteenth century. It must also be remembered that notice of their absence from Troy is nowhere to be found in the Homeric poems. No passage runs to the effect “that the Acarnanians alone took no share in the war under the walls of sacred Ilion, but remained ingloriously at home.” If it were so, the previous hypothesis would be futile.