Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/21

HISTORY AND ORIGIN OF THE PHRYGIANS. ledge of Greece, the gleanings for him who knows how to gather them to be got out of the monuments in which the handiwork of the Phrygians has been recognized, everything in fact, tends to confirm. The caravan routes of the western coast, which led to Smyrna, Ephesus, and Miletus, served as connecting links from the earliest days, between the lonians and the main group of the Phrygian nation that which has left its name to the portion of the plateau comprised between the middle course of the Halys, the head springs of the Sangarius and the Maeander. We may assume that the traditions relating to Ionia reflected, though faintly, the memories the Phrygians themselves had preserved of their own past ; now, these traditions show no proneness for carrying very far back the migration which brought the Phrygian tribes to the peninsula, since Xanthus of Lydia definitely places the event after the Trojan war. 1 As Strabo has already remarked, such an assertion is difficult to reconcile with the testimony of the Homeric poem, in which the Phrygians are represented as the neighbours and allies of the Trojans (XII. viii. 4, XIV. v. 29). The Greeks had no desire to be found to disagree with Homer ; just as, for a long time, whoever handled ancient history was at pains to make his theories fit in with the Bible. Hence it was admitted that the Greeks who followed Agamemnon to Asia, found the Phrygians already at home there and in possession of a vast terri- tory ; nevertheless the migration of the Thraco-Bryges, even for 1 Xanthus, p. 5. Herodotus does not give the date of the migration which brought the Thracians to the peninsula ; if he asserts that the Phrygians had every right to consider themselves as the oldest people in the world, it was on the strength of the experiment made by Psammeticus, which he fully details (ii. 2), but which has no historical value. Its only point of interest resides in the fact that it testifies to that first awaking of a questioning intelligence, which in time was to expand into comparative philology and in our age to take rank among sciences. The two infants reared by Psammeticus in a secluded cottage, wherein no human voice was ever heard, in their first cry imitated the bleating of a goat, said to resemble " bee, bee," and one of the Asiatic Greeks in the king's body-guard forthwith identified the sound with the Phrygian word becos, bread. The anecdote simply proves the readiness of the Greek mind to find a solution, good or bad, to any problem pre- sented to it. For the rest, the Phrygians might be " very ancient " in Herodotus' sense, and yet comparatively of recent date in Asia Minor. Arrian, in a passage preserved by Eustathes (Denys Periegetes, 322), says that the Phrygians passed from Thracia to Asia to escape the hardships consequent on the incursions of the Cimmerians. Inadmissible though this may be from a chronological standpoint, it is none the less important to show that authoritative wiiteis were not disposed to carry back the migration under notice to remote antiquity.