Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/32

[4 HISTORY OF GREECE. the mouths cf the Peneius and the Haliakmou, was the original abode of the Pierian Thracians, who dwelt close to tht foot of Olympus, and among whom the worship of the Muses seems to have been a primitive characteristic; Grecian poetry teems with local allusions and epithets which appear traceable to this early fact, though we are unable to follow it in detail. North of the Pierians, from the mouth of the Haliakmon to that of the Axius, dwelt the Bottiaeans. 1 Beyond the river Axius, at the lower J I have followed Herodotus in stating the original series of occupants on the Thennaic gulf, anterior to the Macedonian conquests. Thucydides in- troduces the Paeonians between Bottiieans and Mygdonians : he says that the Paeonians possessed " a narrow strip of land on the side of the Axius, down to Pclla and the sea," (ii, 96.) If this were true, it would leave hardly any room for the Bottiaeans, whom, nevertheless, Thucydides recognizes oil the coast ; for the whole space between the mouths of the two rivers, Axius and Haliakmon, is inconsiderable; moreover, I cannot but suspect that Thucydides has been led to believe, by finding in the Iliad that the Paeo- nian allies of Troy came from the Axius, that there must have been old Paso- nian settlements at the mouth of that river, and that he has advanced the inference as if it were a certified fact. The case is analagous to what he says about the Boeotians in his preface (upon which O. Miiller has already commented) ; he stated the emigration of the Boeotians into Boeotia as having taken place after the Trojan war, but saves the historical credit of the Homeric catalogue by adding that there had been a fraction of them in Bo2Otia before, from whom the contingent which went to Troy was furnish- ed (liirofiaafiof, Thucyd. i, 12). On this occasion, therefore, having to choose between Herodotus and Thucydide's, I prefer the former. 0. Miiller (On the Macedonians, sect. 11) would strike out just so much of the assertion of Thucydides as positively contradicts Herodotus, and retain the rest ; he thinks that the Paeonians came down very near to the mouth of the river, but not quite. I confess that this docs not satisfy me ; the more so as the passage from Livy by which ho would support his view will appear, on examination, to refer to Paeonia high up the Axius, not to a supposed portion of Paeonia near the mouth (Livy, xlv, 29). Again, I would remark that the original residence of the Pierians be- tween the Peneius and the Haliakmon rests chiefly upon the authority of Thucydide's : Herodotus knows the Pierians in their seats between Mount Pangoeus and the sea, but he gives no intimation that they had before dwelt south of the Haliakmon; the tract between the Haliakmon and tho Peneias is by him cone ;ived as Lower Macedonia, or Macedonis, reaching to the borders of Thessaly (vii, 127-173). I make this remark in reference lo sects 7-17 of O. Mailer's Dissertation, wherein the corception of Herod-