Athens: Its Rise and Fall | Page 6

or as savages; in
another, in the same age, they might appear collected into cities and
cultivating the arts. The history of the East informs us with what
astonishing rapidity a wandering tribe, once settled, grew into fame and
power; the camp of to-day--the city of to-morrow--and the "dwellers in
the wilderness setting up the towers and the palaces thereof." [9] Thus,
while in Greece this mysterious people are often represented as the
aboriginal race, receiving from Phoenician and Egyptian settlers the
primitive blessings of social life, in Italy we behold them the improvers
in agriculture [10] and first teachers of letters. [11]
Even so early as the traditional appearance of Cecrops among the
savages of Attica, the Pelasgians in Arcadia had probably advanced
from the pastoral to the civil life; and this, indeed, is the date assigned
by Pausanias to the foundation of that ancestral Lycosura, in whose
rude remains (by the living fountain and the waving oaks of the modern
Diaphorte) the antiquary yet traces the fortifications of "the first city
which the sun beheld." [12] It is in their buildings that the Pelasgi have
left the most indisputable record of their name. Their handwriting is yet
upon their walls! A restless and various people--overrunning the whole
of Greece, found northward in Dacia, Illyria, and the country of the
Getae, colonizing the coasts of Ionia, and long the master-race of the
fairest lands of Italy,--they have passed away amid the revolutions of
the elder earth, their ancestry and their descendants alike

unknown;--yet not indeed the last, if my conclusions are rightly drawn:
if the primitive population of Greece-- themselves Greek--founding the
language, and kindred with the blood, of the later and more illustrious
Hellenes--they still made the great bulk of the people in the various
states, and through their most dazzling age: Enslaved in Laconia--but
free in Athens--it was their posterity that fought the Mede at Marathon
and Plataea,--whom Miltiades led,--for whom Solon legislated,--for
whom Plato thought,-- whom Demosthenes harangued. Not less in Italy
than in Greece the parents of an imperishable tongue, and, in part, the
progenitors of a glorious race, we may still find the dim track of their
existence wherever the classic civilization flourished,--the classic
genius breathed. If in the Latin, if in the Grecian tongue, are yet the
indelible traces of the language of the Pelasgi, the literature of the
ancient, almost of the modern world, is their true descendant!
V. Despite a vague belief (referred to by Plato) of a remote and
perished era of civilization, the most popular tradition asserts the
Pelasgic inhabitants of Attica to have been sunk into the deepest
ignorance of the elements of social life, when, either from Sais, an
Egyptian city, as is commonly supposed, or from Sais a province in
Upper Egypt, an Egyptian characterized to posterity by the name of
Cecrops is said to have passed into Attica with a band of adventurous
emigrants.
The tradition of this Egyptian immigration into Attica was long
implicitly received. Recently the bold skepticism of German scholars
--always erudite--if sometimes rash--has sufficed to convince us of the
danger we incur in drawing historical conclusions from times to which
no historical researches can ascend. The proofs upon which rest the
reputed arrival of Egyptian colonizers, under Cecrops, in Attica, have
been shown to be slender--the authorities for the assertion to be
comparatively modern--the arguments against the probability of such
an immigration in such an age, to be at least plausible and important.
Not satisfied, however, with reducing to the uncertainty of conjecture
what incautiously had been acknowledged as fact, the assailants of the
Egyptian origin of Cecrops presume too much upon their victory, when
they demand us to accept as a counter fact, what can be, after all, but a

counter conjecture. To me, impartially weighing the arguments and
assertions on either side, the popular tradition of Cecrops and his
colony appears one that can neither be tacitly accepted as history, nor
contemptuously dismissed as invention. It would be, however, a
frivolous dispute, whether Cecrops were Egyptian or Attican, since no
erudition can ascertain that Cecrops ever existed, were it not connected
with a controversy of some philosophical importance, viz., whether the
early civilizers of Greece were foreigners or Greeks, and whether the
Egyptians more especially assisted to instruct the ancestors of a race
that have become the teachers and models of the world, in the elements
of religion, of polity, and the arts.
Without entering into vain and futile reasonings, derived from the
scattered passages of some early writers, from the ambiguous silence of
others--and, above all, from the dreams of etymological analogy or
mythological fable, I believe the earliest civilizers of Greece to have
been foreign settlers; deducing my belief from the observations of
common sense rather than from obscure