THE EARLY AGE OF GREECE VOL.I by W.Ridgeway 1901

WHO WERE THE MAKERS? 183
the outcome of a long steady growth. We may therefore
make up our minds that the only true claimant for authorship
must be a people who can show that it has long dwelt
in the islands of the Aegean Sea.
In classical times, the Cyclades were inhabited by what was
regarded as more or less an homogeneous people. There is a
proof of their ethnic imity
in the undoubted ftict that 'the
people of twelve of these islets met annually at Delos to
celebrate the great festival of the Delian Apollo on that sacred
spot where older tradition averred, and rightly too, as I shall
later on endeavour to prove, that Poseidon and not the Far-darter
had once received the homage of the assembled islanders. The
people who there met were known to the Greeks of the fifth
century B.C. as lonians. From the Hynm to the Delian Apollo
we learn that the goodly company who listened to " the blind
old man of Scio's rocky isle " was composed of those who dwelt
in Imbros, Samos, Chios, Lesbos, Samothrace, Lemnos, and
others of the Cyclades as well as of those from Athens, Aegina,
and Euboea.
Herodotus tells us that the population of the islands was
Peiasgian, but was afterwards called Ionic for the same
reason as the inhabitants of the twelve cities on the mainland
of Ionia who were sprung from Athens. In the same
chapter he has ali-eady told us that the lonians as long as
they dwelt in Peloponnesus,
Afhaia, and before the coming
in that district now called
of Danaus and Xuthus to
Pelo[)oiniesus, as the Hellenes say, were called Aegialean
Pelasgi>.
But we hear a good deal about other ]ieoplcs who occupied
at one time the islands and tile
contiguous coasts of A.sia
Minor. Th(! (>ai'ians aild Leieges figuri' considerably in the
earliest records of the Aegean, and the former were ])ut
foiwaid
as as])irants for the Myceiiean throne by several eminent
scholars. We must therefore face the geneial (|uestioii
of
the relation of these peoples (a) to one anothei'. and (h) to
the Peiasgian siork.
'
VII. 04. Dion. Hal. (i. IS) siivs tlutt, on the .\clu'iiii cdiKiuost of Tliessaly
some of tlie exi)ell(d Peliis^^'iaiis settled in the isliiiids.
184 WHO WERE THE MAKERS ?
It is evident that if we can show that either one or other
of these is related to the Pelasgians and that the Carians
and Leleges are of the same ethnic group, we shall have proved
that both of them are Pelasgic. Thucydides in a well-known
passage^ in which he describes the condition of Greece tells
earl}"^
us that the islands were originally occupied by the Carians and
Pheenicians, but that when Minos established his Thalassocracy,
of which Thucydides had any tradition, he put down
the first
the Carian pirates and driving out the Carians from the islands
planted his sous there as their rulers.
" The islanders especially were pirates, being Carians and
Phoenicians. For it was these that had colonized ,most
of the
islands. And this is a proof of it: when on the purification
of Delos by the Athenians in the course of this war, and all the
tombs of those who had died in the island were taken up, above
half were found to be Carians ;
being recognized by the fashion
of the arms buried with them, and the manner in which they
still bury."
When the Catalogue of the Ships was composed, the Carians
were in full occupation of what was later to be known as Ionia.
Thus the poet speaks of Miletus as " the city
of the barbarousspeaking
Carians."
Herod(jtus'-^ says "the Carians are a race that came into
the mainland from the islands. In ancient times they were
subjects of king Minos and went by the name of Leleges,
dwelling among the islands, and, so far as I have been able to
push my in(|uiries, never liable to give tribute to any niiui.
They served on board the ships of king Minos whenever he
required them and
; thus, as he was a great concjueror and
})r()spere(l in his wars, the Carians were in his day
the most
famous by far of all the nations of tli^.^ cartli Long after the
time of Minos tjie Carians were driven from the islands by the
the mainland. The
lonians and Dorians, and so settled upon
above is th(.' account which the Cretans give of the Carians, l)ut
the Carians themselves say very differently. They maintain that
they an^ the al)original inhal)itants of the part of the mainland
where they now dwell, and ne\cr had any other name than that
'
I. H.
;
I. 171.