3.
The feebleness of antiquity is further proved to me
by the circumstance that there appears to1 have been no common action in Hellas before the Trojan War.
[2]
And I am inclined to think that the very name was not as yet given to the whole
country, and in fact did not exist at all before the time of Hellen, the son of
Deucalion; the different tribes, of which the Pelasgian was the most widely spread, gave
their own names to different districts. But when Hellen and his sons became powerful in
Phthiotis, their aid was invoked by other cities, and those who associated with them
gradually began to be called Hellenes, though a long time elapsed before the name
prevailed over the whole country.
[3]
Of this Homer affords the best evidence;
for he, although he lived long after the Trojan War, nowhere uses this name
collectively, but confines it to the followers of Achilles from Phthiotis, who were the
original Hellenes; when speaking of the entire host he calls them Danaans, or Argives,
or Achaeans.
Neither is there any mention of Barbarians in his poems, clearly because there were as
yet no Hellenes opposed to them by a common distinctive name.
[4]
Thus2 the several Hellenic tribes (and I mean by the term Hellenes
those who, while forming separate communities, had a common language, and were
afterwards called by a common name)3, owing to their weakness and
isolation, were never united in any great enterprise before the Trojan War.
And they only made the expedition against Troy after they had gained considerable
experience of the sea.
1 No unity among the early inhabitants: no common name Hellenes or Barbarians; or common action in Hellas before the Trojan War.
2 Or, supplying κληθέντες with both clauses: 'those who successively acquired the Hellenic name, which first spread among the several tribes speaking the same language, and afterwards became universal.'
3 Or, supplying κληθέντες with both clauses: 'those who successively acquired the Hellenic name, which first spread among the several tribes speaking the same language, and afterwards became universal.'
Thucydides translated into English; with introduction, marginal analysis, notes, and indices. Volume 1. Thucydides. Benjamin Jowett. translator. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1881.
This text was converted to electronic form by optical character recognition and has been proofread to a high level of accuracy.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.