249 
1874.] Rajendralala Mitra —The Yavanas of Sanskrit Writers . 
It is not at all necessary for my purpose here to enquire which of the 
two versions is the true one ; in either case we have a very prosaic and 
matter-of-fact solution of a highly romantic myth ; and few will, I imagine, 
he disposed to doubt that the myth is only a poetical embellishment of a 
very common occurrence in primitive states of society, and that the so-called 
descendants of Io are the mixed descendants of sea-faring men of various 
nationalities on the western coast of Asia Minor with an occasional trace of 
Greek blood in them, and that trace derived, in most instances, from the 
maternal side ; for the practice of carrying away Greek slave girls by pirati¬ 
cal traders was common in the early history of Greece. The Greeks them¬ 
selves, in early times, did not recognise them as their descendants or members 
of their race, and could not, therefore, he supposed to have assumed the 
term Ionian as their race name. Homer was well aware of the myth of 
Io; for he assigns to Zeus the epithet ’Apyei^dvr^s or ‘ Argos-slayer’ to 
indicate that part of the myth which says that Argos, as the emissary of 
Hera, too carefully watched the movements of Io in her bovine form, to 
prevent Zeus from restoring his lady-love to her human shape, and was 
ultimately destroyed by him but he does not call the Greeks Ionians, 
except in the line : 
evOa Se Boiootoi kcu Taoves eX/ceytTwres. (II. N. 685.) 
In commenting on this line, Arnold says, “ These are the Ionians of 
Greece, particularly the Athenians, whom Homer, however, calls nowhere 
else by this name. This whole passage to 700 offers matter for grave doubts, 
which cannot he treated of here.” Sclilegel condemns the passage as “ a later 
interpolation;” and Lassen, “in confirmation of this hypothesis,” observes 
“ we have to hear in mind that the Ionians formed a very small portion of 
the Greek tribes that left Attica (Herod., I. 146 ; Pausanias, VII. 234), and 
secondly that Ion does not trace his descent immediately from Hellen, 
which Doros and Aiolos do, hut from his son Xuthos, and that the notices 
regarding his origin and that of his brother Acliaios are of various nature.” f 
“ With the Greeks themselves,” he adds, “ the name is post-Homeric, and 
came probably only into use after the Greek tribes occupied the islands and 
Asia Minor, and must have arisen from a general term used by the older 
inhabitants of the land for those who, unlike the Aeolians and Dorians, did 
not bring an ethnic name with them, hut were formed by the union of 
several peoples with different names.”]; 
The Hebrew equivalent of the Greek Taoves, with the digamma “ Ia- 
Fores, is Javan , which under the form of Jehohanan is equivalent to Twvai/ 
and Tc oavvav. In the Septuagint Tcoarv^s is used in the place of the 
# Keightley’s Mythology of Greece, 361. 
t Indisclxe Altertlmmskunde, 736. 
# J Ibid., loc. cit. 
