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barbarous, or foreign in language and manners to themselves. Among these names, that of the Pelasgians claims our first and chief attention, both because it appears to have been by far the most widely spread, and because it continued longer than the others-so late as the fourth century before our era-to be applied to existing races. So that, on the notions we connect with it, our view of the ancient state of Greece must mainly depend; and to it we may most reasonably look for the fullest and clearest information the case admits of. Homer, as well as Herodotus and Thucydides, speaks of the Pelasgians only as occupying some insulated points, and those not in the continent of Greece, but in Crete and Asia Minor, where, in the Trojan war, they side with the Trojans against the Greeks. But that in earlier times they were widely diffused in Greece itself, is established by unquestionable evidence, and is confirmed by allusions which occur in the Homeric poems to their ancient seats. We even meet with expressions in ancient writers which, at first sight, seem to justify the supposition that the whole of Greece was once peopled by Pelasgians. All," says Strabo, "are pretty well agreed that the Pelasgians were an ancient race, which prevailed throughout all Greece, and especially by the side of the Eolians in Thessaly:" and since the Eolians were commonly supposed to have sprung from Deucalion, who first reigned in countries westward of Thessaly, while the higher antiquity of the Pelasgians was universally admitted, this statement appears in substance to coincide with that of Herodotus, who speaks of the Pelasgians as inhabiting the country afterward called Greece. But in another passage, where he observes that what Hecatans had said of Peloponnesus-that barbarians inhabited it before the Greeksmight be applied to nearly the whole of Greece, Strabo illustrates his meaning by a long list of other races, which he seems to consider as equally ancient and equally foreign; so that the prevalence he ascribes to the Pelasgians can only be understood as subject to the same restrictions with which it is spoken of by Thucydides, who mentions them as the tribe which, before the rise of the Hellenes, had spread its name more widely than any other over the country. And this view must also have been that of Herodotus; since, when he is describing the growth of the Hellenic nation as the effect of its union with the Pelasgians, he adds, that it received an accession from many other barbarous tribes. There can, therefore, be no doubt that the Greeks regarded the Pelasgians as only one, though the most powerful, among the races anciently settled in Greece.

We arrive at the same conclusion, if we inquire into the particular regions occupied by the Pelasgians for we then find that, according to ancient tradition, they were not spread uniformly over the whole of Greece; but that, while in some districts they are exclusively mentioned, in others they appear among a crowd of other tribes, and that in others, again, no trace of them seems to be found. If we approach Greece from the north, we meet with the first distinct evidence of their presence on the eastern side of Pindus in Thessaly. It is attested, not only by the general voice of antiquity, but by monu

ments which both prove the existence of the people, and afford some insight into their character and condition. A district, or a town, in the southeast of Thessaly, is mentioned in the Iliad as the Pelasgian Argos. The opinion entertained by some of the ancients, that this Argos was a part of the great Thessalian plain, one region of which bore the name of Pelasgiotis in the latest period of Greek history, is confirmed by Strabo's remark, that the word Argos signified a plain in the dialects of Thessaly and Macedonia. In the richest portion of this tract, on the banks of the Peneus, stood one of the many cities called Larissa: a word which was perhaps no less significant than Argos, and, according to one derivation, may have meant a fortress or a walled town. Most of the Larissas known to have been founded in very ancient times may be clearly traced to the Pelasgians;* and there is, therefore, good reason for believing that the word belonged to their language, and for considering it as an indication of their presence. Besides the celebrated city on the Peneus, there were two other towns of the same name, one on the northern, the other not far from the southern border of Thessaly; from which it seems fair to infer that the Pelasgians once possessed the whole country. Yet they were not exclusively known there under that name; for we find the people who continued in after ages to be called Perrhæbians, occupying the same seats in the earliest times; and we learn that Simonides spoke of them as the Pelasgian part of the new population formed by the irruption of the Lapiths in Thessaly. The same, therefore, may have been the case with other tribes-of which it is not expressly recorded-as it probably was with the Dolopes, who, as well as the Pelasgians, are mentioned as ancient inhabitants of the island of Scyros; and the Athamanes, who were neighbours of the Perrhæbians, and, like them, were expelled by the Lapiths. Besides the names of Argos and Larissa, another occurs in Thessaly, which carries us back into the most remote antiquity, and is no less intimately connected with the Pelasgian race. Achilles, in the Iliad, invokes Jupiter as the Dodonæan, Pelasgian king; and it was a disputed point among the ancients, whether the Dodona, from which the god derived this epithet, lay in Thessaly or in Epirus, The Iliad testifies the existence of a Thessalian Dodona in the land of the Perrhæbians; and, by describing a river which flowed through the adjacent region as a branch of the infernal Styx, seems plainly to mark this Dodona as the seat of a worship similar to that which prevailed in Epirus, the mythical realm of Aïdoneus; and some ancient writers maintained that the oracle of the Pelasgian Jupiter had been transplanted from Thessaly‡ to the Thesprotian Dodona.

If, according to the more common opinion, which was supported by the authority of Aristotle, Homer spoke of the Western Dodona as sacred to the Pelasgian god, the Iliad would contain the earliest allusion to the abode of the * A list of them is given by Strabo, ix., p. 440. Steph. Byz., s. v. Raoul Rouchette, Col. Gr., i., 178. † Strabo, ix, p. 442.

Awdwvn, or from Scotussa. Strabo, vii.
Either from Dodona (or Bodona), Fragm. Steph. Byz.,

Meteor, i., 14.

ed Perrhæbians, and perhaps likewise Dolopes, and Athamanes, as in Epirus they were called Selli, Chaones, and apparently also Græci; so, in Attica, no period is mentioned during which the name of Pelasgians prevailed, though Herodotus holds it unquestionable that the Athenians always belonged to that nation. There was, indeed, a people which dwelt for a time in Attica, and was known there by the name of Pelasgians, or Pelargians. A monument of their presence was preserved to the latest times, in the Pelasgian wall with which the citadel of Athens was fortified. But they were strangers who, as Herodotus says,* became neighbours land as the price of their services in building the wall. According to Ephorus, they were the same Pelasgians who were driven out of Boeotia after the Trojan war; and Pausanias found some reasons for believing that they had migrated from Acarnania, and that they were originally Sicels;† whether he meant by this, that their more ancient seats lay in Sicily, or Italy, or Epirus, is doubtful; but it looks as if this tribe were only called Pelasgians, because it was not known to what race they more particularly belonged.

Pelasgians in Epirus. That this country was one of their most ancient seats, and that the Thesprotian Dodona belonged to them, is universally admitted. Yet the race described in the Iliad as dwelling round the sanctuary was called by a different name; they were the Helli, or Selli; and they appear to have been not merely the ministers of the temple, but a considerable tribe; for they occupied a region named, no doubt from them, Hellopia.* Another people, whom Aristotle places along with the Helli, "in the parts about Dodona and the Achelous," were the Graci; and it cannot be doubted that this race, from which the Italian name of the Hellenes has been transmitted through the Ro-to the Athenians, and received a portion of man into the modern European languages, must have been extensively spread. We find the Pelasgians, however, distinctly connected with a third people, who are said to have ruled over all Epirus before it fell under the dominion of the Molossians -the Chaones: they are described, like the Selli, as interpreters of the oracle of Jupiter, and Chaonia is called Pelasgian.† But if we pursue our inquiry along the coast of the Adriatic into Greece, we immediately lose sight of the Pelasgians: in Ætolia and Acarnania, the earliest known inhabitants bear different names, as Leleges, Taphians, Teleboans, Cu- In Peloponnesus, as in the north of Greece, Teles. So, too, after leaving Thessaly, as we the Pelasgians appear to be confined to particular proceed southward, we meet with no Pelas- regions, though Ephorus said that the whole was gians before we come into Boeotia. Here their once called Pelasgia. That they were ancientname occurs, indeed, but only as one among aly predominant in the peninsula, may be inferred great number of barbarous tribes, the ancient possessors of the country; and the way in which they are mentioned seems to imply that they gained a footing here after the rest. "Baotia, it is said, was first inhabited by barbarians, Aones, and Temmices, and Leleges, and Hyantes. Afterward the Phoenicians, the followers of Cadmus, took possession of it; and his descendants continued masters of nearly all Bootia, till they were dislodged, first by the expedition of the Epigoni from Argos, and afterward again by the Thracians and Pelasgians." These Pelasgians, according to Ephorus, were driven out of Boeotia into Attica by a revolution, which Thucydides places sixty years after the Trojan war.‡

But Attica, as we learn from Herodotus, had long before this event been peopled by Pelasgians. According to his view, the Athenians of his own day were a Pelasgian race, which had been settled in Attica from the earliest times, and had undergone no change, except by successively receiving new names, and by adopting a new language. "The Athenians," he says, "when the Pelasgians were in possession of the country now called Hellas, were Pelasgians, named Cranai; but under the reign of Cecrops they were called Cecropida: when Erechtheus succeeded to the kingdom, they changed this name for that of Athenians; and when Ion, son of Xuthus, became their general, they took the name of Ionians." This is, indeed, strictly speaking, a history only of Athens; but it evidently includes that of Attica; and we perceive in it the same distinction, which we have already so frequently met with, between the name and the blood of the people. As in Thessaly there were Pelasgians who were call+ Strabo, vii. Steph. Byz., Xaovía.

* Strabo, vii.
Strabo, ix., p. 401.

from the opinion which prevailed among the ancients, that it was the part of Greece from which they issued to overpower the rest: there is, however, no express evidence that they ever occupied any other districts than Argolis, Achaia, and Arcadia. Argoli was not less celebrated as a Pelasgian country than Thessaly. There they founded a Larissa, which was generally supposed to have been the oldest of all the cities so called: hence it was said to have been named after Larissa, the daughter of Pelasgus; and the adjacent territory, which, like the Thessalian plain, was called Argos, and distinguished by the epithet Achaian, was considered by many ancient authors as the mothercountry of the whole Pelasgian nation. This opinion seems to have been deliberately adopted by Eschylus, who, in one of his tragedies, introduces Pelasgus, king of Argos, claiming for the people named after him a vast territory, extending northward as far as the Strymon. The mention of the Dodonæan Mountains, the Perrhæbians, and Pæonians, in the poet's description, seems to imply that, according to his view, which is expressed far too accurately to be ascribed to poetical license, the name of Pelasgians might be properly applied to the most ancient inhabitants of Greece, Epirus, and Macedonia. Yet he undoubtedly knew that many races of other names existed in those countries during the same period to which he refers the dominion of the Pelasgians. In Achaia, as in Attica, according to a tradition which Herodotus says was current through

ii., p. 51. Kruse, Hellas, i., p. 416, overlooking the word yévovTo in this passage, represents these Pelasgians as a part of the original population of Attica; whereas Herodo tus agrees with Ephorus and Pausanias in describing them as strangers. tii, 23, 3. Dion. Hal., i., 17. Steph. Byz., Пaddacía.

just taken of the Pelasgian settlements in Greece appears inevitably to lead to the conclusion that the name Pelasgians was a general one, like that of Saxons, Franks, or Alemanni; but that each of the Pelasgian tribes had also one peculiar to itself. We shall even find ground for believing that the nation was once spread much more widely than the name; but, at all events, we cannot be sure that, in every instance, both the general and the particular name of each tribe have been preserved: it is much more probable that, in the numberless migrations and revolutions which took place in the period we are now considering, either one or the other has often been lost; and therefore if we inquire into the relations between the Pelasgians and the other barbarous tribes by which Greece is said to have been anciently peopled, their names alone cannot guide us to any safe conclusion; and whenever we decide the question without any other grounds, we shall be as much in danger of separating kindred races, as of confounding those which were most foreign to each other.

f

All that we can venture to say of these obscure tribes is, that, so far as tradition affords us any insight into their national affinities, they appear to be connected with the Pelasgians, and that we can discover no argument, except the diversity of names, to exclude the conjecture that they were all branches of the same stock. This conjecture is perfectly consistent with the general statements of many ancient authors, some of which have been already mentioned, concerning the prevalence of the Pelas

out Greece, the first settlers were Pelasgians, and they were only named Ionians after Ion, the son of Xuthus, came among them: they had before been called simply Ægialeans, coastmen, as the most ancient name of the country was Egialus, or the Coast.* Combined with this testimony, the names of Larissa, and the River Larisus, which formed the boundary between Elis and Achaia, may be regarded as indications of the same fact ;† and the tradition, that agriculture was first introduced into Achaia from Attica by Triptolemus, points towards the same result.t Arcadia was so celebrated as a Pelasgian land, that it disputed the honour of being the mothercountry of the whole nation with Argolis; and even the authors who preferred the title of the Argive Pelasgians, did not deny that the Arcadians were at least younger members of the same family. Ephorus, tracing the origin of the nation to Arcadia, followed the authority of Hesiod, who had spoken of Lycaon, the son of Pelasgus, as the father of six sons. Later mythologers attributed a more numerous offspring to Lycaon; and, according to their system, each of the Lycaonids became the founder of a city, or the father of a people. The names of these heroes are indeed all fictitious; but they prove that the inhabitants of the cities and regions which correspond to them were conceived to be connected together by a national affinity, for which no expression could be found more suitable than to call them descendants of Pelasgus; and though the authors may have been sometimes mistaken on this point, still their opinion deserves respect, wherever it is consistent with the general tenour of tradition. We must there-gians in Greece: it expresses the same view fore believe that it was well founded with regard to the Arcadians themselves, and that they were, not, indeed, the posterity of Pelasgus, but a Pelasgian people: for Herodotus also calls the Arcadians who joined the Ionian migration Pelasgians. An important inference seems to flow from the fact; since the Arcadians, so far as history is able to trace them, were always in possession of the same country, and nevertheless were held no less genuine members of the Hellenic body than the Dorians or Ionians. This has led a modern author, who separates the Pelasgians very widely from the Greeks, to deny the identity of the Pelasgians with the Arcadians, and to believe that they were only settled in a part of Arcadia; that they were a people totally distinct from the original Arcadians; and that the band of Pelasgian emigrants mentioned by Herodotus was the last remnant of their race in the region which has generally been considered as one of their principal seats. We shall soon have occasion to inquire whether it is necessary to adopt this conjecture. But we may here observe, that the difference between the two names cannot be admitted as an argument in its favour. Homer, indeed, though he speaks of Pelasgians in Crete and Asia, does not call the Arcadians by that name. But neither does he call the Selli about Dodona Pelasgians, though it would be contrary to all tradition, as well as to probability, to suppose that the Pelasgians had, before the poet's age, been deprived of their oracle. The review we have

* Compare Herod., vii., 94, and Pausan., vii., 1, 1.
↑ Strabo, ix., p. 440.
+ Paus., vii., 18, 2.
4 Struly t., p. 221.
Paus., vini., 3, 1.

which we should have been led to form, if we had no other information, by the poetical description of Eschylus; and if it is at variance with those accounts in which a variety of barbarous races is spoken of, the misconception it attributes to the historians whom it appears to contradict is so natural, and so common, that it detracts little from their authority. But as it is contrary to the opinion of most modern writers, and especially of one who has thrown more light than any other on this subject,* it will not be superfluous to point out some of the indications that suggest it.

Among the barbarians mentioned as the most ancient inhabitants of Greece, there are several tribes, as the Boeotian Hectenes, Temmices, Aones, and Hyantes, of whom our knowledge goes no farther than their names; and it would be idle to build a conjecture about them on the tradition that two of them had migrated from Sunium in Attica,† and that a third finally settled in Phocis and Ætolia. But there seems to be good reason for believing that the Caucones, who once occupied a great part of the western side of Peloponnesus, where a remnant of them long continued to bear that name, were a Pelasgian race, as some ancient authors held them to be. This was undoubtedly the view of the writer who reckoned Caucon among the sons of Lycaon, and it is confirmed by the legends which connect a person of the same name with the religion of Eleusis, which he is said to

of Rome.

Niebuhr, note 67, in the third edition of his History + Strabo, ix., p. 401. Paus., x., 35, 5. Strabo, X., p. 464. ◊ Strabo, xii., p. 542.

We

have introduced into Messenia, during the reign | lowed the authority of Hesiod, who spoke of of the first king.* A similar conclusion is that them as the first men that sprang from the which most readily offers itself with regard to stones with which Deucalion repeopled the the Leleges, who occur very often in the tra- earth after the deluge, and as the subjects ditions relating to the early state of Greece, but of Locrus. Accordingly, they are reckoned are exhibited under many totally different, and among the forces with which Deucalion exalmost contradictory, aspects. In the Iliad, pelled the Pelasgians from Thessaly. These they appear as auxiliaries of the Trojans: their western Leleges were, according to Aristotle, king, Altes, is Priam's father-in-law; and they the same who occupied Megara; so that he inhabit a town called Pedasus, at the foot of seems to reject the story of the Egyptian coloIda. Strabo relates, that they once occupied ny; and thus, if we inspected their supposed the whole of Ionia, together with the Carians, wanderings very closely, we should have to who were so blended with them, that the two explain how the Leleges, who drove the Pelasraces were often confounded. In many parts gians from Iolcus, happened to be found by of Caria, however, and in the territory of Mile- them in Pylus, when they took refuge there. tus, the fortresses and sepulchres of the Leleges But the real question is, how far the traditions were distinguished at a very late period; and concerning the Leleges in the northwest of the Carian town of Pedasa, Strabo says, was Greece, and those of the Egean, relate to the named by them. They were the earliest known same people. For the Asiatic side of their hisinhabitants of Samos, where they were said to tory would lead us to believe that their settlehave founded the most ancient temple of Heré, ments in Asia either preceded the revolutions a Pelasgian goddess.t According to Herodo- by which the Hellenic name became prevalent tus, the Carians were called Leleges while they in Thessaly, or were an effect of them. possessed the islands of the Ægean. It is clear, gain little light by finding Teleboas enumerated however, both from the traditions of the Carians among the posterity of the Arcadian Pelasgus themselves, and from all other traces, that the by Apollodorus. Strabo himself considered two nations were quite distinct in their origin; them not only as a wandering, but as a mixed and perhaps Herodotus only meant to signify that race, and seems to have been half inclined to they were confounded together in the islands, believe that their name was formed to express which he elsewhere says were peopled, before this. Yet Hesiod, on whose verses he grounds the Ionian migration, by a Pelasgian race.‡ his conjecture, can only have meant to allude This accidental intermixture of the Leleges and to their high antiquity. It is, however, very Carians was probably the foundation of the Me- probable that their name either was at first degarian tradition that, in the twelfth generation scriptive, and was applied to many independent after Car, Lelex came over from Egypt to Me-tribes, or, having originally belonged to one, gara, and gave his name to the people. A grandson of this Lelex is said to have led a colony of the Megarian Leleges into Messenia, where they founded Pylus, and remained till they were driven out by Neleus and the Pelasgians from Iolcus, and took possession of the Elean Pylus. The presence of Leleges in Messenia seems to be attested by the name of the "vine-cherishing Pedasus," which occurs among the seven flourishing_towns, "all near the sea at the extremity of Pylus," offered by Agamemnon to Achilles. On the other hand, the Laconian traditions spoke of a Lelex, the first native of the Lacedæmonian soil, from whom the land was called Lelegia, and the people Leleges; and the son of this Lelex is said to have been the first king of Messeniathe same in whose reign Caucon was related to have introduced the Eleusinian mysteries there. T

was gradually extended to others that were connected with it by their fortunes, or, as was the case between the Taphians and the Leleges of the Egean, resembled it in their habits. But, however this be, the result to which our inquiry leads is, that they may safely be regarded as allied either to the Pelasgians or the Hellenesthat is, in a certain degree, as will be hereafter explained, to both.

We perceive sufficient grounds for a similar conclusion as to the Thracians, who are numbered among the barbarous inhabitants of Bootia. They are indeed represented as sharing the possession of the country with the Pelasgians; but if the view we have taken of the Pelasgians does not deceive us, this tradition is perfectly consistent with a close affinity between these two races, and it is indifferent whether we consider the one as a branch of the other, or both as springing from a common stock. These Baotian Thracians were un

If on the coast of Asia, in the islands, and in the south of Greece, the Leleges appear so in-doubtedly distinguished, not only by their name, termixed with the Carians that it is difficult to but by a very peculiar character, from the other separate them, in the north of Greece they pre- Pelasgian tribes; but their relation to the sent the aspect of a genuine Hellenic race. Greeks appears to have been very similar to Aristotle seems to have thought that their origi- that of those Pelasgians who were most propnal seat was on the western coast of Acarnania, erly so called. Whether they were also in any or in the Leucadian Peninsula for there, ac-degree related to the people who are known to cording to him, reigned a Lelex, the first child of the soil; from whom descended the Teleboans, the same people who are celebrated in the Odyssey under the name of Taphians. Aristotle likewise regarded them as of the same blood with the Locrians in which he appears to have fol

:

* Paus., iv., 1, 5.

♦ Paus., i., 39, 6.

:

Athen., v., p. 672. t vii., 95.
Ibid., iv., 36, 1.

¶ Ibid., iii., 1, 1; iv., 1, 1, and 5.

us by the name of Thracians in later ages, is a question the more difficult, as the population of Thrace underwent great changes during the period in which that of Greece was shifting, and even after the latter had finally settled; and it is not clear, either how far the tribes which are said to have migrated from Thrace into † Dion. H., i., 17.

* Strabo, vii., p. 321, 327.

Asia Minor, and to have established themselves | Thracians, the tribe which seems to have comthere under various names-as Mysians, Bi- bined the various elements of the Greek mythynians, Mariandynians were allied to the thology, and to have moulded them nearly into subsequent possessors of their European seats, the form they present in the Homeric poems.* or these among one another. It is possible A later age, indeed, forged names, perhaps, as that the Doloncians of the Thracian Chersone- well as works, of ancient Thracian bards, which sus, who sent envoys to the Delphic oracle in may have been utterly unknown to Homer and the time of Pisistratus, were but very remotely his contemporaries. But, though he never connected with their fierce neighbours, the Ap- speaks of Orpheus or Musæus, he has preservsinthians, who sacrificed their captives with pe- ed the memory of the Thracian Thamyris, the culiar rites to their god Pleistorus:* and there rival of the Muses, whose fate was undoubtedly seem to be still stronger reasons for thinking the theme of a very ancient legend; and he has that the Baotian and Phocian Thracians had thus placed the general character of the people nothing but the name in common with the sub- on which this and numberless others were jects of Teres, the founder of the Odrysian founded, beyond dispute. If, however, it is admonarchy, whom Thucydides deemed it neces-mitted that the Thracians exerted such an insary, for the information of Athenian readers, fluence as has been ascribed to them on the expressly to distinguish from the mythical Te- poetry and the religion of Greece, it is scarcely reus, the king of Daulis, and the husband of possible to conceive that they can have been Procne.† Strabo observes that the worship of separated from the countrymen of Homer by so the Muses on Mount Helicon, and the cave there broad a cleft as the ambiguity of their name dedicated to the Leibethrian Nymphs, proved suggested to the Greeks, who termed them, as that this region had been occupied by Thra- well as the Pelasgians, barbarians. And hence, cians, and that these Thracians were Pierians, in their case at least, there is no room for a the people who consecrated the land of Pieria, suspicion that the distinction has been artifiat the northern foot of Olympus, and Leibeth- cially disguised, and that the significant local rum, and Pimpleia, to the same powers. But names, from which Strabo drew his proof of it does not appear why the Pierians are called their Pierian origin, did not belong to them, but Thracians; for Homer describes Thrace as were substituted for others of the same meanbeginning far from Pieria; so that Juno, when ing in their barbarous tongue. she descends from the Thessalian Olympus to seek Lemnos, lights upon Pieria, and Emathia, before she bounds towards the snowy mountains of the Thracians. The Pierians may have been the genuine Thracians, from whom the name was extended to the foreign tribes that surrounded them; or, if they migrated from the North to the land at the foot of Olympus, they may have brought with them a name derived from the seats they had left.

Though the Baotian Thracians belong to a mythical period, and none of the legends relating to them can claim to be considered as historical traditions, still their existence, and their affinity with the Northern Pierians, are well attested; and the same evidence that proves these points, justifies us in attributing several important consequences to their presence in Greece. The worship of the Muses, which is uniformly acknowledged to have been peculiar to them, though it arose out of the same view of nature which is expressed in many popular creeds, appears to have afforded a groundwork for the earliest stage of intellectual culture among the Greeks. The belief that the invisible deities who dwelt in the depths of caves and fountains, loved music and song, and could dispense the inspiration by which the human voice was modulated to tuneful numbers, implies a disposition to poetry, and some experience of its effects. This connexion between a popular form of religion, and the first strivings of poetical genius, does not indeed warrant any conclusion as to the character they assumed, or afford a ground for supposing that the earliest poetry of Greece was distinguished from that of a later period by being exclusively dedicated to religious subjects. But it is probable enough that the Greek oracles owed their origin to this source, even if that of Delphi was not founded by the Pierian t II., 29. 11., xiv., 226.

• Herod, iz., 119.
! Strabo, 11, p. 410.

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 anything 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

this may be inferred from the single fact that the Pierian Mueller, Prolegomena, z. e. w. M., p. 219, thinks that Olympus, which is the seat of the gods, gives the Muses their epithet in Homer and Hesiod. The reader should, however, compare the two leading passages on this subject, Paus., ix., 29, 3; Strabo, ix., p. 410, on which Mueller has commented in his Orchomenus, p. 381, foll.

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