Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. EARLIEST CONDITION OF THE NATION; AND ITS BRANCHES. The nation of the Hellenes, as they called themselves after an ancient leader, (for they received the name of Greeks from foreigners, ) preserved many a tradition respecting their earliest state, representing them to have been nearly on a level with the savage tribes which now wander in the forests of North America. From these traditions, it would seem, that there was once a time, when they had no agriculture, but lived on the spontaneous produce of the woods; and when even fire could not be appropriated to the service of man, till it had first been stolen from Heaven. Yet, in the meanwhile, they gradually spread over the country, which they afterwards possessed; and all foreign tribes were either driven from the soil, or were mingled with them. Much is told of the emigration of individual tribes, from the southern districts to the northern, and from these back again into the southern; but the peculiar habits of nomades, as seen in the nations of middle Asia, belonged to the Greeks as little as to the Germanic race. The moderate extent and the hilly character of their cquntry, which afforded no pasture for large flocks, did not admit of that kind of life. As far as we can judge from the very indefinite accounts of this early period, it seems that, especially inthe fourteenth and thirteenth centuries before the Christian era, the race of the Hellenes was already so far extended over Hellas, that it was every where predominant. For it appears as such even then, before the Trojan war. The nation of the Pelasgi, which, no less than that of the Hellenes, belonged to the first inhabitants of the country, and which must be considered as having had a different origin, since their language was different, may at an e…
