guised, and that the significant local names, from which Strabo drew his proof of their Pierian origin, did not belong to them, but were substituted for others of the same meaning in their barbarous tongue.

Pelasgians, as we have already observed, appear in the Iliad among the auxiliaries of the Trojans. From later evidence we learn that they were scattered over the western coast of Asia Minor, nearly in the same seats as the Leleges; and three ancient towns in this tract bore the name of Larissa. Here therefore they seem to be a peculiar tribe, distinct from all the others enumerated by the poet, and Pelasgians their proper name. That it was so, cannot be doubted, since, even in the time of Herodotus, the inhabitants of two towns on the Propontis were so called. Yet unless we knew whether these Asiatic Pelasgians were colonies from Greece, or had never moved farther westward, they would not assist us to determine the original extent of the name. In the one case, it may have been given to them because they had migrated from various regions, and could only be designated by a word of comprehensive meaning; in the other case, they may have retained it as their ancient and distinguishing title.

As to the quarter from which the Pelasgians came into Greece, we cannot expect to learn any thing from the Greeks, since they themselves were content with their ignorance on this subject, and were not even tempted to inquire into it. The ancient writers, who recorded their historical knowledge or opinions in the form of poetical genealogies, when they had ascended to the person whom they considered as the common ancestor of a nation, thought it enough to describe him as the son of a god, or as the natural fruit of the earth itself, or uniting both these views in a third, as framed by the divine will out of some brute matter. Thus many of these genealogies terminate, as we have seen, in children of the soil; and though the Greek word that denoted this 1 was some times vaguely used to express the antiquity of · αυτόχθονες.

a race, there can be no doubt that it was generally received, not only by the vulgar, but by educated men, and without reference to any peculiar philosophical system, like that of Empedocles, in its most literal sense.1 Hence Plato, in the funeral oration, in which he embraced all the topics that could flatter the vanity of the Athenians, dwells upon this popular notion, which was certainly not his own. "The second praise," he says, "due to our country is, that at the time when the whole earth was sending forth animals of all kinds, wild and tame, this our land proved barren and pure of wild beasts, and from among all animals chose and gave birth to man, the creature which excels the rest in understanding, and alone acknowledges justice and the gods." With the same right that the Athenians claimed this glory for themselves, the Arcadians boasted of being older than the moon 2; and, indeed, when the principle was once admitted, and the agency of an intelligent Creator excluded, since the mechanical difficulty costs no more to overcome in many instances than in one, there was no reason why every valley should not have produced its first man, or rather a whole human harvest. The antiquity of the Arcadians was asserted by the genealogical poet Asius of Samos, who is supposed to

1 Kruse, i. p. 396., very superfluously for his argument, questions this; because Aristotle (Rhet. i. 5.) speaks of high birth as consisting, in the case of a nation, or a city, in being duróxlovas exαious, - a passage from which it is impossible to draw any inference even as to ⚫ Aristotle's own opinion. But the popular notion seems to be distinctly expressed, though not without humorous exaggeration, by Plato, Menexenus, p. 237. Kruse also concludes (i. p. 428.) that Pausanias, though he reports the popular belief of the Arcadians, that Pelasgus was the first man who came into being in Arcadia, himself believed that a different race preceded the Pelasgians there. Pausanias however, far from saying any thing to warrant this conjecture, observes that Pelasgus could not have been born alone, for then he would have had no people to govern, but that other men must have been born together with him, though he may have excelled them in the qualities of his body and his mind. The general opinion of Pausanias himself on this subject is distinctly intimated, viii. 29. 4., where, having mentioned some gigantic bones that had been found in Syria, and had been declared by the oracle of Claros to belong to Orontes, an Indian, he adds, If the sun made the first men, by heating the earth, which in ancient times was still full of moisture, what land is likely to have brought forth men sooner than that of the Indians, or to have produced men of greater size, since even in our day it breeds strange and huge beasts?"

2zgorivo. Other explanations have been given of the word (as preHellenic). Its true derivation does not concern us here.

2

have flourished so early as the beginning of the Olympiads, and who sang of the Arcadian Pelasgus, that "the black earth sent him forth in the shady mountains, that the race of mortals might exist." According to the more commonly received opinion, the Argive Pelasgians were the eldest of the race. But the only question among the antiquarians was, from what part of Greece it had issued: none thought of tracing it to any foreign region, as its earlier home. The presence of the Pelasgians in Greece, is not only the first unquestionable fact in Greek history, but the first of which any tradition has been preserved.

This fact however does not merely set bounds to our inquiries, beyond which they find no ground to rest on; it also warrants a conclusion, which it is useful to bear in mind. It seems reasonable to think that the Pelasgians would not have been, as they appeared to Ephorus, the most ancient people of whose dominion in Greece any rumour remained 3, if they had not been really the first that left some permanent traces there. If they were not the original inhabitants of the country, at least no nation more powerful or more civilised can easily be imagined to have been there before them; and if any of the tribes whose names are coupled with theirs belonged to a different, and a more ancient race, it is probable that the obscurity which covers them is owing to their utter feebleness and insignificance. On the other hand, though to the Greeks the history of the Pelasgians began in Greece, and we are therefore unable to pursue it further, it should be remembered that this is only an accidental termination of our researches, and that the road does not necessarily end, where the guide stops. If we believe that the Pelasgians really existed, we must also believe that they either sprang out of the ground, or dropped from the clouds, or that they migrated into Greece from some part of the earth nearer to that where mankind first 2 Dionys, A. R. i. 17.

1 Paus. viii. 1. 4.

3 Strabo, vii. p. 327.

came into being. But though we have the strongest grounds for adopting the last of these opinions, we must be cautious not to confound it with others which neither flow from it, nor are necessarily connected with it. Reason and authority may unite to convince us, that the Pelasgians were a wandering people, before they settled in Greece; but neither supplies an answer to any of the numberless questions which this fact suggests. Yet most of the views that have been formed of them in modern times, appear to have been, at least secretly, affected by a preference given to some single conjecture over multitude of others equally probable. For the sake of guarding against such prepossessions, it is useful to remember the great diversity of ways by which such a country as Greece may have received its first population; and that we have no historical evidence to determine us in favour of one hypothesis, to the exclusion of the rest: but that the variety and apparent inconsistency of the local traditions relating to the Pelasgians would incline us to suppose, that they came into Greece, not from a single side, nor during a single period, nor under the same circumstances; but that many tribes were gradually comprehended under the common name, which, though connected together by a national affinity, had been previously severed from each other, and had passed through different conditions and turns of fortune. The Greek traditions about their migrations rest on no firmer ground than the opinion that they were somewhere or other in a literal sense natives of the Greek soil: if we reject it, there is no necessity to imagine that either their seats in the north, or those in the south of Greece, were the more ancient, or that the connection of parent and colony subsisted, immediately or remotely, between their most widely parted settlements.

The greater the extent we assign to the Pelasgians, the more interesting it is to consider their relation to the Greeks. If they once covered the whole, or the greater part of Greece, they must be held to have con

stituted the main bulk of its population, throughout the whole period of its history; for not only have we no record or report of any violent convulsion, or revolution, by which its ancient inhabitants were wholly or mostly exterminated or dislodged, but we find the contrary expressly asserted by the most authentic writers. It therefore becomes a very important question, in what sense we are to understand the same writers, when they speak of the Pelasgians and their language as barbarous, that is, not Hellenic. Must we conceive the difference implied by this epithet so great, that the Pelasgians may have been no less foreign to the Greeks, and their language not more intelligible to them than the Phoenician or the Etruscan ?1 The most satisfactory answer to this question would be afforded by remains of the language itself, if any such still existed in sufficient amount to determine its character. But unfortunately the only specimens that can be brought forward, without assuming the point in dispute, consist of names of persons and places, handed down by tradition, few in number, and of an ambiguous aspect. It must be acknowledged that those which recede farthest from the ordinary Greek form are safer tests than those which coincide with it; because in the latter cases there is room to suspect that the Pelasgian original may have been either translated, or adapted to Greek ears. Strabo himself mentions several names of foreign sound, as betokening the barbarian origin of the persons who bore them. It is remarkable that one of these names is that of the Athenian king Codrus, a supposed descendant of Nestor. Strabo's authority is decisive as to the fact but when we reflect how strange most of the Saxon names that were current in England before

Kruse (i. p. 398. note 9., and p. 463. note) appears to conceive that the Pelasgian tongue was either the same with the Etruscan, or formed one of its elements. At least his argument rests on this supposition. Kreuser (Vorfragen ueber Homeros, p. 83. and foll.) labours to prove the identity of the Pelasgians and the Phoenicians by some new and ingenious arguments. F. Thiersch (in the Munich Denkschriften, 1813, p. 35. n. 26.) brings them out of Asia, to overpower, unite, and civilise the primitive inhabitants of Greece,