these late writers had access to any better information than we now possess on this subject, but that they were less afraid of raising a great pile of conjecture on a very slender basis of facts.

CHAPTER II.

Herodotus may have had their refreshing influ- | reasonably awaken a suspicion that they were ence chiefly in view. mere fictions, which did not even spring out of Greece lies in a volcanic zone, which extends any popular belief, but were founded on an opinfrom the Caspian-if it does not extend still far-ion which prevailed in the Alexandrian period ther east-to the Azores, and from the 45th to of Greek literature among the learned, and the 35th degree of latitude,* the greater part of which was adopted in its full extent by the elder the world known to the Greeks. Though no Pliny. Thus, we find Callimachus speaking traces of volcanic eruptions appear to have been generally of islands as formed of the fragments discovered in Greece, history is full of the ef- which Poseidon had severed with his trident fects produced there by volcanic agency; and from the mountains.* Pliny is more explicit : permanent indications of its physical character he does not hesitate to deliver, as a notorious were scattered over its surface, in the hot fact, that nature had torn Sicily from Italy; springs of Thermopylæ, Træzen, Ædepsus, and Cyprus from Syria; Euboea from Boeotia ;† and, other places. The sea between Peloponnesus again, Atalanté, Macris, and Ceos,‡ from Eubœa; and Crete has been, down to modern times, the and that the sea had not only burst through the scene of surprising changes wrought by the straits of the Bosporus, the Hellespont, Rhium, same forces; and not long before the Christian and Leucas-though in this last instance the era, a new hill was thrown up on the coast near channel was notoriously artificial-but that it Trazen, no less suddenly than the islands near had taken the place of the land in the Propontis, Thera were raised out of the sea.t Earth- and in the gulfs of Corinth and Ambracia. We quakes, accompanied by the rending of mount-may, perhaps, most safely conclude, not that ains, the sinking of land into the sea, by temporary inundations, and other disasters, have in all ages been familiar to Greece, more especially to Peloponnesus. And hence some attention seems to be due to the numerous legends and traditions which describe convulsions of the same kind as occurring still more frequently, and with still more important consequences, in a period preceding connected history; and which may be thought to point to a state of elemental warfare, which must have subsided before the region which was its theatre could have been fitted for the habitation of man. Such an origin we might be inclined to assign to that class of legends which related to struggles between Poseidon and other deities for the possession of several districts; as his contests with Athené (Minerva) for Athens and Træzen; with the same goddess, or with Heré (Juno), for Argos, where he was said, according to one account, to have dried up the springs, and, according to another, to have laid the plain under water; with Apollo for the isthmus of Corinth. We might be led to put a like interpretation on the poetical traditions, which spoke of a period when several of the islands between Greece and Asia, as Delos and Anaphe,¶ and even Rhodes,** and Cyprus,++ were yet cover-narrow compass if we venture beyond this ed by the sea, out of which they rose at the bid- limit, we pass into a boundless field of conjecding of some god. And still greater weight ture, where every step must be made on dispumay seem to belong to a tradition preserved by table ground, and all the light we can obtain the priests of Samothrace, an island famous for serves less to guide than to perplex us. There its ancient mystic worship, who told of a great are, however, several questions relating to the convulsion, which had burst the barriers that original population of Greece which it may be once separated the Euxine from the Egean, fit to ask, though we cannot hope for a comand had opened the channels of the Bosporus pletely satisfactory answer, if for no other purand the Hellespont.‡‡ It would not be difficult pose, at least to ascertain the extent of our to connect this tradition with a poetical legend, knowledge. This is the main end we propose in which Poseidon was said to have struck the in the following inquiry; but we shall not scruland called Lycaonia, or Lyctonia, with his tri-ple to pursue it, even where we are conscious dent, and to have scattered its fragments, as islands, over the sea. But the vast magnitude of the changes described by these legends may

THE EARLIEST INHABITANTS OF GREECE. ALL we know about the earliest inhabitants of Greece is derived from the accounts of the Greeks themselves. These accounts relate to a period preceding the introduction of letters, and to races more or less foreign to that which finally gave its name to the country. On such subjects tradition must be either vague and general, or filled with legendary and poetical details. And, therefore, we cannot wonder that, in the present case, our curiosity is in many respects entirely disappointed, and that the information transmitted to us is in part scanty and imperfect, in part obscure and confused. If we only listen to the unanimous testimony of the ancients, we find that the whole amount of our knowledge shrinks into a very

that it cannot lead to any certain result, so far as we see any grounds to determine our opinion on the most interesting points of a dark and intricate subject.

The people whom we call Greeks-the Hellenes-were not, at least under this name, the first inhabitants of Greece. Many names have been recorded of races that preceded them there, which they, in later times, considered as

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 Etolia and Acarnania, the earliest known inhabitants bear different names, as Leleges, Taphians, Teleboans, Cu- In Peloponnesus, as in the north of Greece, retes. 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 Bootia. Here their name occurs, indeed, but only as one among a 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. "Bootia, 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.‡

once called Pelasgia. That they were anciently predominant in the peninsula, may be inferred 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 But Attica, as we learn from Herodotus, had opinion seems to have been deliberately adopted long before this event been peopled by Pelasgi- by Eschylus, who, in one of his tragedies, inans. According to his view, the Athenians of troduces Pelasgus, king of Argos, claiming for his own day were a Pelasgian race, which had the people named after him a vast territory, exbeen settled in Attica from the earliest times, tending northward as far as the Strymon. The and had undergone no change, except by suc- mention of the Dodonæan Mountains, the Percessively receiving new names, and by adopt-rhæbians, and Pæonians, in the poet's descriping a new language. "The Athenians," he tion, seems to imply that, according to his says, "when the Pelasgians were in possession view, which is expressed far too accurately to of the country now called Hellas, were Pelasgi- be ascribed to poetical license, the name of ans, named Cranai; but under the reign of Pelasgians might be properly applied to the Cecrops they were called Cecropida: when most ancient inhabitants of Greece, Epirus, and Erechtheus succeeded to the kingdom, they Macedonia. Yet he undoubtedly knew that changed this name for that of Athenians; and many races of other names existed in those when Ion, son of Xuthus, became their general, countries during the same period to which he they took the name of Ionians." This is, in- refers the dominion of the Pelasgians. deed, strictly speaking, a history only of Athens; Achaia, as in Attica, according to a tradition but it evidently includes that of Attica; and we which Herodotus says was current throughperceive 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 callStrabo, vii. Steph. Byz., Xaovia.

* Strabo, vii.

Strabo, ix., p. 401.

In

*ii., p. 51. Kruse, Hellas, i., p. 416, overlooking the word yévovro 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. t., 23, 3 Dion. Hal., i., 17. Steph. Byz., Пaddacía

just taken of the Pelasgian set.lements 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 particulai 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.

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.‡ 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 All that we can venture to say of these obof a city, or the father of a people. The names scure tribes is, that, so far as tradition affords of these heroes are indeed all fictitious; but they us any insight into their national affinities, they prove that the inhabitants of the cities and re-appear to be connected with the Pelasgians, gions 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

which we should have been led to form, if we had no other information, by the poetical deseription 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 Baotian 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 Etolia.‡ 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

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

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 Ægean, 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.† 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. We 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 was gradually extended to others that were grandson of this Lelex is said to have led a connected with it by their fortunes, or, as was colony of the Megarian Leleges into Messenia, the case between the Taphians and the Leleges where they founded Pylus, and remained till of the Ægean, resembled it in their habits. But, they were driven out by Neleus and the Pelas- however this be, the result to which our inquiry gians from Iolcus, and took possession of the leads is, that they may safely be regarded as Elean Pylus. The presence of Leleges in allied either to the Pelasgians or the HellenesMessenia seems to be attested by the name of that is, in a certain degree, as will be hereafter the "vine-cherishing Pedasus," which occurs explained, to both. among the seven flourishing towns, "all near We perceive sufficient grounds for a similar the sea at the extremity of Pylus," offered by conclusion as to the Thracians, who are numAgamemnon to Achilles. On the other hand, bered among the barbarous inhabitants of Boothe Laconian traditions spoke of a Lelex, the tia. They are indeed represented as sharing first native of the Lacedæmonian soil, from the possession of the country with the Pelaswhom the land was called Lelegia, and the gians; but if the view we have taken of the people Leleges; and the son of this Lelex is Pelasgians does not deceive us, this tradition said to have been the first king of Messenia-is perfectly consistent with a close affinity bethe same in whose reign Caucon was related to have introduced the Eleusinian mysteries there.¶

tween 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 Boeotian 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 us by the name of Thracians in later ages, is a the soil; from whom descended the Teleboans, question the more difficult, as the population of the same people who are celebrated in the Odys-Thrace underwent great changes during the sey under the name of Taphians. Aristotle likewise regarded them as of the same blood with the Locrians in which he appears to have fol+ vii., 95. Ibid., iv., 36, 1.

:

* Paus., iv., 1, 5. + Athen., v., p. 672. Paus., i., 39, 6.

Ibi ., iii., 1, 1; iv., 1, 1, and 5.

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, 322.