DESTRUCTION OF HELLENIC SOCIETY. 7 § 2. citizens into one mass, and facilitated the acquisition CHAP. I. of the boon of freedom by every Christian slave. The 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 § 2. CHAP. I. bringing agricultural produce to market, is greater in Greece than in most other countries; and it would be considered by proprietors of whole provinces as an unprofitable sacrifice. Their neglect consequently pro duced the abandonment of the cultivation of the soil in a great part of the country, and its conversion into pasture land. From provinces in this condition the Byzantine government often derived very little revenue, for the large proprietors found facilities of gaining exemption from taxation, and the impoverished condition of the farmers or colons rendered the tribute insignificant. The defence of a province so situated became a matter of no interest to the central power at Constantinople, and it was abandoned to the invaders without a struggle. In Greece, the great proprietors seem to have been left to defend themselves against the intrusion or invasion of the Sclavonian nomades without assistance, and the progress of the first Sclavonian colonists may have been facilitated by the numbers of agricultural slaves of Sclavonian race whom they found established in the country. The Sclavonian lands were the great slave marts of the age. Such was the internal state of preparation in Greece to encounter the enemy when the Sclavonians attacked the Byzantine empire as a warlike and conquering race. The earliest steps by which the Sclavonians colonised the Hellenic soil are unnoticed in history. Like the subsequent increase in the number of the Greeks which expelled or absorbed them, its very causes pass unrecorded, and the greater part of what we know is learned by inferences drawn from incidental notices connected with other facts. Strange to say, this remarkable revolution in the population of Greece excited very little attention among modern historians until recently; and the great vicissitudes that took place in the numbers of the Greek population of the Byzantine empire in Europe, during different periods of the middle ages, is a subject which has not yet been carefully investigated.1 The fabric of the ancient world was broken in pieces during the reign of Justinian, and Greece presented the spectacle of ruined cities and desolate fields. Procopius, in recording one of the great irruptions of the Hunnish armies, whose course was followed by Sclavonian auxiliaries and subjects, mentions that the barbarians passed the fortifications at Thermopylæ, and spread their ravages over all the continent inhabited by the Greeks, as far as the isthmus of Corinth. This notice places the commencement of the hostile incursions of the Sclavonians into Greece as early as the year 540.2 But the colonisation of great part of the Hellenic soil by a foreign race is a fact first noticed long after its occurrence, and whose extent is proved more convincingly by its consequences than by the testimony of historians. In the adulatory work of Procopius on the buildings of Justinian, the conversion of a large part of Greece into pasture lands, by the repeated ravages of the barbarians, is incidentally revealed; and the necessity of constructing forts, for the protection of the population engaged in the regular agricultural operations of husbandry, is distinctly stated. The fourth book is filled with an enumeration of forts and castles constructed and repaired for no other object. 1 Colonel Leake, in his Researches in Greece, published in 1814, first pointed out the proofs we have of the long residence of the Sclavonians in every part of Greece, and cited the principal Byzantine authorities which certify the political importance of these colonies, p. 379. Professor Fallmerayer became the champion of Sclavonianism, in his History of the Morea, in 1830; and he has ever since defended the cause with great eloquence, learning, and wit, but with some exaggeration. It was Colonel Leake who first observed that the Sclavonian names of places in Greece are often the same as those of places in the most distant parts of Russia. By means of this discovery, Fallerayer endeavours to exterminate the ancient Greeks. 2 Procopius, De Bello Persico, lib. ii. c. 4, p. 95, (Paris edit.) He mentions frequent incursions of the Sclavonians into Illyria and Thrace; and in alluding to this very expedition in the secret history, he connects the Huns, Sclavonians, and Antes, together as allies, (c. 18, p. 54.) Several Byzantine historians speak of irruptions of the Huns and Sclavonians, in a united body, into Thrace in 559.-Malalas, 235; Theophanes, 197; Cedrenus, 386; Clinton, Fasti Romani, i. 810. § 2. $ 2. CHAP. I. The care, too, which the emperor devoted to fortifying the isthmus of Corinth, when he found that the greater part of the Peloponnesian cities were not in a state of defence, affords strong proof of the danger of an irruption of barbarous tribes, even into that secluded citadel of the Hellenic race. The particular mention of the fortifications necessary to protect the fertile land on the river Rhechios, in Macedonia, and the construction of the city of Kastoria, to replace the ruined Diocletianopolis, while they prove the desertion of great part of Chalcidice and Upper Macedonia by the ancient inhabitants, prepare us for finding these districts occupied by a new race of emigrants.2 Now, it is precisely in these districts that we find the Sclavonians first forming the mass of the inhabitants within the limits once occupied by the Hellenic race.3 In these cases of colonisation, as in many others afterwards, it is possible that the Sclavonians occupied their new settlements without any opposition on the part of the Roman government; and though their countrymen continued to ravage and depopulate the provinces of the empire as enemies, these peaceable settlers may have been allowed to retain their establishments as subjects and tributaries. It is certain that the Goths, and other Teutonic people who invaded the Eastern Empire, were nothing more than tribes of warriors, who, like the Dorians, the Romans, and the Othoman Turks, became great nations from the extent of their conquests, not from their original numerical strength. But the Sclavonian race, on the contrary, had for ages formed the bulk of the population in the wide-extended territories that spread from the shores of the Adriatic to the sources of the Dnieper and the Volga. In a considerable portion of the countries in which they subsequently appear as 1 Procopius, De Edificiis, lib. iv. c. 2, p. 71. Ibid. lib. iv. c. 3-4. The Rhechios is supposed to be the river that flows from the Lake Bolbe to the Gulf of Strymon. 3 Tafel, De Thessalonicâ ejusque Agro. Proleg. lvii. SCLAVONIAN COLONISATION OF GREECE. 11 § 2. conquerors, a kindred race seems to have cultivated the CHAP. I. soil, even under the Roman government; but at what period the Sclavonians began to force themselves southward into the territories once occupied by the Illyrians and the Thracians, is a question of too much obscurity to be examined in this sketch. The successive decline of the Roman, Gothic, and Hunnish empires, in the provinces along the Danube, allowed the hitherto subject Sclavonians to assume independence, and form themselves into warlike bands, in imitation of their masters. The warlike and agricultural Sclavonians from that time became as distinct as if they belonged to two different nations. A contrast soon arose in their state of civilisation; and this, added to the immense extent, and disconnected and diversified form of the territory over which the Sclavonian race was scattered, prevented it from ever uniting, so as to form one empire. The Sclavonians always make their appearance in the history of Greece as small independent hordes, or as the subjects of the Huns, Avars, or Bulgarians, and never, except in the Illyrian provinces, form independent states, with a permanent political existence. Their ravages as enemies are recorded, their peaceful immigrations as friends and clients pass unnoticed. No inconsiderable part of those provinces of the Eastern Empire that were desolated by the repeated inroads of the northern nations were nevertheless repeopled by Sclavonian colonists, who, often fearing to devote themselves to husbandry, lest they should invite fresh incursions, confined their attention to pasturing cattle, and adopted a nomadic life as the only method of securing their property. In this way they became, according to the vicissitudes of the times, the serfs or the enemies of their Greek neighbours in the walled towns. It was a characteristic of the Sclavonian colonists, in the Byzantine empire, for a long period, that they had an aversion to agriculture, and followed it only |