ELEMENTS OF THE POPULATION IN GREECE. 3 $ 1. tion may have been of mixed race during the classic ages CHAP. I. is great. The one relates to the proportion in which the Pelasgi, or original inhabitants, combined with the agricultural classes of the Hellenic race; the other, to the numbers of the slave population, and to the manner in which slavery declined and disappeared. A doubt arises whether the agricultural slaves were exterminated by the barbarian invaders of the Hellenic soil, or were absorbed into the mass of the Sclavonian or Byzantine population. These questions prove how uncertain all inquiries into the direct affiliation of whole nations must be. Of what value is the oldest genealogic tree, if a single generation be omitted in the middle? Whether the Greeks themselves were not a foreign tribe that intruded themselves on a race of which the Pelasgi were the principal branch, is a question that will probably always remain doubtful. Whether the Greeks exterminated this older race, as our own historians represent the Saxons to have exterminated the Britons, or mingled with them to form one people, like the Saxons and Normans, or whether the difference between the Greeks and Pelasgi was not so great as to exclude all consanguinity, are questions that belong to the realm of conjecture, not of history. As the two ablest modern historians of Greece, Grote and Thirlwal, adopt different views on the Pelasgic question, it may be considered as one that is not likely ever to be decided.1 The question concerning the numbers of the slave population hardly admits of a more satisfactory answer. Liberated slaves certainly engrafted themselves into the 1 Thirlwal, History of Greece, vol. i. chap. 2. Grote, History of Greece, vol. ii. 349. The subject is treated with learning and judgment by Mr Mure of Caldwell, in his Critical History of the Language and Literature of Greece, vol. i. 48. After all, we have nothing explicit on the language of the Pelasgians but the passage of Herodotus, i. 57; and his words would authorise us to infer that the languages of the ancient Greeks and the Pelasgians were as different as those of the modern Greeks and the Albanians. Yet it would perhaps be as applicable if the difference were no greater than that between high and low German, or between Dutch and English. § 1. CHAP. I. native blood of Greece, to some extent, in Roman times; but it is difficult to ascertain what proportion of the freedmen that filled Greece were of foreign origin. Slavery was for many ages the principal agent of productive industry in Greece; the soil was cultivated by slaves, and all manufactured articles were produced by their labour. Throughout the whole country, they formed at least onehalf of the population.1 Now, although the freedmen and descendants of liberated foreign slaves never formed as important an element in the higher classes of the population of Greece as they did of Rome, still they must have exerted a considerable influence on society. And here a question forces itself on the attention,-Whether the singular corruption which the Greek language has undergone, according to one unvarying type, in every land where it was spoken, from Syracuse to Trebizond, must not be, in great part, attributed to the infusion of foreign elements, which slavery introduced into Hellenic society in numberless streams, all flowing from a similar source? The Thracians and Sclavonians were for centuries to the slavetrade of the Greeks what the Georgians and Circassians have been for ages to the Mohammedan nations, and the Negroes of the African coast to the European colonies in America. Whatever may have been the operation of these causes in adulterating the purity of the Hellenic race and the Greek language, we know that they did not display any effect until about the middle of the sixth century of our era. At that time, the population of Greece presented all the external signs of a homogeneous people. In the third century, the Greek language was spoken by the rural population with as much purity as by the inhabi 1 For the best information on the numbers of the slave population, see Clinton, Fasti Hellenici, vol. ii. 381. In comparing the numbers of the slaves in Greece with those in the slave states of North America, we must recollect that the proportion of adults would be greater in Greece, as the importation was free. CORRUPTION OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE. 5 § 1. tants of the towns, and even the ancient peculiarities of CHAP. I. dialect were often preserved.1 Nor did the condition of the mass of the population, greatly as it was diminished, undergo any material change until after the time of Justinian; for the invasions of the Goths in the third and fourth centuries were temporary evils, that only caused a permanent decrease in the population in so far as they destroyed the productive powers of the country. The causes that transformed the ancient Greeks of Justinian's age into the modern Greeks who inhabited the soil of Hellas in the time of the Crusaders, seem, on the whole, to have been internal rather than external. Foreign invaders had less to do with the change than slavery, ignorance, and social degradation. Time alone might claim some share in the transformation; but time ought to be an improver in every well-constituted community; and the Orthodox Church, which exercised a very powerful social influence on the Greek race during the period in question, must be supposed to have counteracted the progress of corruption. Among an illiterate people like the Greeks of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, each successive generation alters the language of oral communication, by neglecting inflexions and disregarding grammatical rules. A corrupted pronunciation confounds orthography, and obscures the comprehension of the grammatical changes which words undergo. Indeed, the whole process of transforming the Hellenic language into the Romaic, or modern Greek dialect, seems to have arisen out of a long neglect of the rules of grammar and orthography; and the pronunciation, though corrupted in the confusion it makes of vowels and diphthongs, is evidently based on the ancient, from the tenacity with which it has preserved the Hellenic accentuation, 1 Philostratus, though speaking of an earlier period, may be received as an authority for his own time, which may extend considerably into the third century. See the dialogue with Sostratus in the Life of Herodes Atticus, and the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, lib. viii. § 12. CHAP. I. after the disappearance of every trace of quantity.1 § 1. The modern language, with its inflexions correctly written, might easily be mistaken for a colloquial dialect of some ancient Greek colony, were it possible for a scholar unacquainted with the existence of the nation in modern times to meet with a Romaic translation of Thucydides. There is as much difference between the language of Homer and the New Testament, as between that of the New Testament and a modern Greek review. Greek and Arabic seem to be the two spoken languages that have suffered the smallest change in the lapse of ages. The inference is plain, that these are the nations which have admitted the smallest infusion of extraneous social elements, and been the least under foreign compulsion in modifying their habits and ideas; or else, that the ties of blood and race are weaker than those of civilisation and religion, and literature and religion have created Arabs and Greeks out of Syrians or Ethiopians, and Sclavonians or Albanians. Christianity opened the way for a great change in the Hellenic people. The principles of the gospel worked simultaneously with the oppressive administration of the Roman government, in breaking down the barriers of caste and pride of race that, in the days of Hellenic liberty, kept the free citizens of each state separated from the strangers who frequented the exchange, and the slaves who laboured in the workshops, tilled the fields, or cultivated art or literature for profit in the city. The laws of Justinian blended all classes of 1 Ducange traces the progress of corruption in the Latin language, in the preface to his Glossarium mediæ et infimæ Latinitatis. Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe in Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, vol. i. p. 69, Paris edit., notices a MS. in the British Museum, (Cotton. Galba, i. 18,) containing the Lord's Prayer in Greek, written in Anglo-Saxon characters, which proves the pronunciation to have been the same in the eighth century as at present. Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons, iii. 396. See also the German translation of Henrichsen's Tracts in Danish-Ueber die Neugriechische Ausprache der Hellenischen Sprache, p. 38; and Ueber die sogenannten politischen Verse bei den Griechen, 27. DESTRUCTION OF HELLENIC SOCIETY. 7 citizens into one mass, and facilitated the acquisition CHAP. I. of the boon of freedom by every Christian slave. The § 2. pride of the Hellenic race was stifled, and the Greeks for centuries were proud of the name of Romans, and eager to be ranked with the freedmen and manumitted slaves of the masters of the world. The Greek church grew up; and the Greek church was neither Greek nor Roman, but it created to itself a separate power under the name of Orthodox, which, by forming a partnership with the imperial authority, acquired a more energetic existence than any nationality could have conferred: it controlled the actions and the intellects of the Greeks with despotic power. A system of laws at variance with all the prejudices of ancient, private, and political life was framed, and the consequence was that a new people arose out of the change. Such seems to be the origin of the modern Greeks, a people which displays many appearances of homogeneity in character, though it is widely dispersed in various insulated districts, from Corfu to Trebizond, and from Philippopolis to Cyprus. But to what extent the original Hellenic race was mixed and adulterated with slaves and foreigners, is not very clear from the great patent facts of history. SECT. II.-DEPOPULATION OF GREECE UNDER THE ROMAN GOVERNMENT. The depopulation of Greece under the Roman government, as well as the political oppression to which the people was exposed, and the social demoralisation that was its consequence, force themselves on the attention. This depopulation was increased and perpetuated by the immense landed estates which accumulated in the hands of individual proprietors. The expense of maintaining good roads and other adjuncts of civilisation, necessary for |