Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/201

§ 48. In the first place, the Athenians, as Ionians, possessed a dialect which, carried by their kinsmen to the Ionic cities of Asia Minor, became the earliest vehicle of prose in the literary history of Greece—the Ἑπτάμυχος of Pherecydes of Scyros was the first attempt at a prose treatise in Greek. In common with other Ionians, also, they possessed certain religious festivals—the Thargelia and Pyanepsia of Apollo, the Anthesteria and Lenæa of Dionysus, the Apaturia, Eleusinia, and others. The federations of early Ionians may indeed be compared with Arab and Hebrew tribe-leagues marking their federal union by sacred festivals; and the eponymous ancestor of such leagues was long as highly respected in Athens as in Israel or Arabia. The Ion of Euripides, it has been remarked, was designed to extol the pure blood of Athenians, and to show that the Ionic stock from which they claimed descent was not, as represented in ordinary legends, that derived from the Hellenic stranger Xuthus, but had originated from Apollo himself; and though the ordinary legends probably went much nearer the truth (just as Ezekiel in his denunciations of Israel reminds his countrymen of their hybrid origin, "Thy father was an Amorite and thy mother a Hittite "), the eponym Ion and the purpose for which the story is dramatised seem to mark the influence of clan ideas in Athens, even in an age when her old religion and clan morality were being rapidly undermined by individualised thought. But the Athenians had something more than the mere instrument of literature in common with their Ionic kinsfolk of the East; from them they learned the A B C of philosophy, history, poetry. Among the Eastern Ionians chronicling had commenced at Miletus, the birthplace of the earliest philosophers of Greece—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, An Ionic poet of the East, Callinus of Ephesus,