the Conquest, now sound to us, how many are entirely out of use, it seems hazardous to draw any inference from such specimens, and still more so to trust our own judgment as to the character of the Pelasgian

names.

In the days of Herodotus however a language was still spoken, which was believed to be that of the ancient Pelasgians, and was heard by Herodotus himself, as he gives us to understand, at least at three different places. Two of these lay on the Hellespont: as to the third, it is a disputed question whether it was the town of Cortona in Etruria, or one of which nothing else is known, but which must have been seated somewhere on or near a line connecting the heads of the Thermaic and Toronæan gulfs, and not very far from the isthmus of mount Athos. This language Herodotus describes as barbarous, and it is on this fact he grounds his general conclusion as to the ancient Pelasgian tongue. But he has not entered into any details that might have served to ascertain the manner or degree in which it differed from the Greek. Still the expressions he uses would have appeared to imply that it was essentially foreign, had he not spoken quite as strongly in another passage where it is impossible to ascribe a similar meaning to his words. In enumerating the dialects that prevailed among the Ionian Greeks, he observes that the Ionian cities in Lydia agree not at all in their tongue with those of Caria; and he applies the very same term to these dialects, which he had before used in speaking of the remains of the Pelasgian language. This passage affords a measure by which we may estimate the force of the word barbarian in the former. Nothing more can be safely inferred from it, than that the Pelasgian language which Herodotus heard on the Hellespont, and elsewhere, sounded to him a strange jargon; as did the dialect of Ephesus to a Milesian, and as the Bolognese does to a Florentine. This fact leaves

Niebuhr's opinion on this subject is ably controverted by Mueller, Etrusker, i. p. 97.

its real nature and relation to the Greek quite uncertain; and we are the less justified in building on it, as the history of these Pelasgian settlements is extremely obscure, and the traditions which Herodotus reports on that subject have by no means equal weight with statements made from his personal observation.

Thus it seems we cannot appeal to the language itself, nor to any direct testimony concerning it, for evidence of its character; and if we have any means of forming an opinion on it, it must be by examining the historical connection in which the Pelasgians stood with the Greeks, and by inquiring into the conclusions that may be drawn from it with regard to their national affinity. We find that, though in early times Thessaly, and the north of Greece in general, was the scene of frequent migrations and revolutions, so that its ancient inhabitants may here and there have been completely displaced by new tribes, Attica appears never to have undergone such a change; and Peloponnesus lost no considerable part of its original population till long after the whole had become Hellenic. We shall shortly have occasion to consider the nature of this transformation. All we are now concerned to observe is, that it was apparently accomplished without any violent struggle; and that in Arcadia, which is uniformly represented as a Pelasgian land, and was even regarded by many of the ancients as the hive whence the Pelasgian people issued, it seems to have been almost spontaneous. No event, of which any tradition has been preserved, marks the epoch at which the Arcadians ceased to be Pelasgians, and became Greeks. This makes it difficult to believe that the Pelasgian language can have been entirely lost: and it is equally improbable, if it still survives in the Greek, that it can have differed from the pure Hellenic, like the Etruscan or Phoenician, or as the Celtic from the Teutonic, and yet have been so intimately blended with it, that no traces of the two incongruous elements should be perceptible. The force of this argument is not weakened,

even if the extent of the Pelasgian population be reduced within the narrowest limits that have ever been assigned to it, unless it he imagined that they were not only a peculiar tribe, but that they were further removed from the Greek character than others which are coupled with them as barbarous. The slighter we conceive to have been the original distinctions that separated all these tribes from one another, and from the Greeks, the more simply and easily may the propagation of the Greek language be explained.

We find this result confirmed, if we extend our view beyond Greece, and pursue the traces of the Pelasgians in their western seats. These we have not yet noticed, because our object has been, not to make a complete survey of the Pelasgians, but to inquire into their connection with the Greeks. For this purpose it will not be necessary to take any side in the controversy raised among the ancients, and revived by modern writers, about the origin of the Italian Pelasgians. It may be treated as an indifferent question, whether they crossed over from the opposite side of the Adriatic in two great colonies one issuing from Thessaly, the other from Arcadia or were a native race in the same sense as those of Greece. We may however observe, that though the accounts of the two migrations appear to rest rather on the current opinion as to the principal seats of the Greek Pelasgians, than on genuine historical tradition, there is no reason to doubt that the south of Italy received at least a part of its Pelasgian population from Epirus, as the occurrence of the same local names in the two countries naturally suggests. But whatever uncertainty may hang over this subject, it does not affect the main point, the existence of a people in Italy, who were either called Pelasgians, or were known as such by their national features, of language, manners, or religion, and were

1 Chaones, Pandosia, Acheron, Dodona; to which may perhaps be added the Elymians, and Drys (see Raoul Rochette, Colonies Grecques, i. p. 229.), and the Sicels. See an essay of Niebuhr translated in the Philological Museum, No. L

very widely diffused over the peninsula. That they were confined to the northern part, or to Etruria, is an opinion depending on a conjecture supported by no authority that Arcadia was originally peopled by two entirely different races, the one Pelasgian, the other allied to the Greeks, and that the latter sent out colonies to the south of Italy, while the former remained at home, until the last remnant that preserved the national name and character migrated along with the Ionians into Asia. These Arcadian colonies are indeed extremely doubtful, and were very probably fictions invented after the list of the Lycaonids had taken in Enotrus and Peucetius, the mythical fathers of the Enotrian and Peucetian tribes. But the Pelasgian origin of these tribes was then, according to the author of that list, a notorious fact, which he meant to express by the pedigree; and it is confirmed by a casual mention of Pelasgians as standing in the same servile relation to the Italian Greeks, to which Greek settlers very commonly reduced the old inhabitants of a conquered country.1 If this is the right point of view, it would be capricious to doubt, that the portion, or element,-for it includes both substance and form,-which the Latin language has in common with the Greek, was immediately derived from the Pelasgians. It will then follow that their language was at least the basis of the Greek itself, and that it may be far more correctly considered either as a dialect, or an early stage of it, than as totally foreign to it. This general result seems to be well established; but all attempts to define more exactly the relation between the two languages, and to describe their characteristic marks, can only rest on analogies arbitrarily chosen and applied. We must be content with knowing, both as to the language and the race, that no notion of them, which either confounds, or rigidly separates them, will bear the test of historical criticism.

Steph. Byz. Xios. He says that the Italian Greeks treated the Pelas. gians as the Lacedæmonians did their Helots, the Argives their Gymnesians, the Sicyonians their Corynephor), the Cretans their Mnoitæ. See Niebuhr, i. p. 29.

If the Asiatic Pelasgians are spoken of as if they were known by no other name, those of Italy, on the other hand, seem to have borne it only as a common one, which was perhaps introduced by the Greeks, and was probably little or never heard among the several tribes. At least here, as in Greece, each was distinguished by its own. The Pelasgians of Etruria were called Tyrsenians, those of the south Enotrians, Chaones, Siculians, and otherwise, according to their wider or narrower circles. If the name was ever a proper one, it would seem to have belonged originally to one of the eastern branches of the nation, and to have spread westward no further than the shores of the Adriatic.

The obscurity which renders it difficult to ascertain even the general relation of the Pelasgians to the Greeks, also obstructs our inquiries, when we endeavour to determine the degree of civilisation they had attained before they became a Hellenic people, and the steps by which they rose to it. In this respect, as in others, they present two aspects, which it is not easy to reconcile, and neither of which can be shown to be absolutely false. Some accounts represent their original condition as no better than that of mere savages, strangers even to the simplest arts of life, and to the first necessaries of civilised society: others imply that, in the very earliest period of their settlement in Greece, they had already reached a much higher stage of humanity. In the history of their progress too there is an important variation: for, according to one view, it was gradual and spontaneous; according to another, it was the effect of foreign influence. Finally, opinions have diverged no less widely on the rank to which, through either of these means, they rose, independently of the Greeks, as a civilised people. When we consult the testimonies of the ancient authors on these subjects, we are perplexed by the difficulty of distinguishing between genuine tradition and the artificial results of philosophical or historical speculation. So it is with