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 Boeotian 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 sub jects. But it is probable enough that the Greek Herod., ix., 119. 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. 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,* if they had not been really the first that left some permanent traces there. If they were not the divine will out of some brute matter. Thus in Greek history, but the first of which any tramany of these genealogies terminate, as we dition has been preserved. have seen, in children of the soil; and though the Greek word that denoted this* was sometimes vaguely used to express the antiquity of 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.† Hence Plato, in the funeral oration, in which he embraced all the topics that could flatter the vanity of the Athenians, dwells upon this pop-original inhabitants of the country, at least no ular notion, which was certainly not his own. "The second praise," he says, "due to our country is that, at the time when the whole country 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; 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 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 * αυτόχθονες. 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 duróx0ovas hapxalous-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, Menerenus, p. 37. 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 anything 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 ia 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?" porenvoi. Other explanations have been given of the word (as pre-Hellenic). Its true derivation does not concern us here. Dionys., A. R., i, 17. Paus., viii., 1, 4 nation more powerful or more civilized 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 farther, 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 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 a 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 connexion of parent and colony subsisted, * Strabo, vii., p. 327 immediately or remotely, between their most widely parted settlements. 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 en 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 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. The greater the extent we assign to the Pelasgians, the more interesting it is to consider their relation to the Greeks. If they once cov-tered into any details that might have served ered the whole or the greater part of Greece, they must be held to have constituted 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 ?* 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 Thus it seems we cannot appeal to the lanwhich coincide with it; because, in the latter guage itself, nor to any direct testimony concases, there is room to suspect that the Pelas- cerning it, for evidence of its character; and if gian original may have been either translated, we have any means of forming an opinion on or adapted to Greek ears. Strabo himself men- it, it must be by examining the historical contions several names of foreign sound, as beto-nexion in which the Pelasgians stood with the kening 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 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. 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 preserv 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 con-ed, marks the epoch at which the Arcadians necting the heads of the Thermaic and Toronæan Gulfs, and not very far from the isthmus *Kruse (i., p. 398, note ix., 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 civilize the primitive inhabitants of Greece. VOL. I.-G 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 Niebuhr's opinion on this subject is ably controverted by Mueller, Etrusker, i., p. 97 should be perceptible. The force of this argu- | right point of view, it would be capricious t ment 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 be imagined that they were not only a peculiar tribe, but that they were farther 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. doubt that the portion or element-for it i cludes 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. At The obscurity which renders it difficult to ascertain even the general relation of the Pelas 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 connexion with the Greeks. For this purpose, it will not If the Asiatic Pelasgians are spoken of as if be necessary to take any side in the controver- they were known by no other name, those of sy raised among the ancients, and revived by Italy, on the other hand, seem to have borne it modern writers, about the origin of the Italian only as a common one, which was, perhaps, inPelasgians. It may be treated as an indifferent troduced by the Greeks, and was probably little question, whether they crossed over from the or never heard among the several tribes. opposite side of the Adriatic in two great col- least here, as in Greece, each was distinguished on es-one issuing from Thessaly, the other by its own. The Pelasgians of Etruria were from Arcadia-or were a native race in the called Tyrsenians, those of the south Enosame sense as those of Greece. We may, how-trians, Chaones, Siculians, and otherwise, acever, observe, that though the accounts of the cording to their wider or narrower circles. If two migrations appear to rest rather on the cur- the name was ever a proper one, it would seem rent opinion as to the principal seats of the to have belonged originally to one of the eastGreek Pelasgians, than on genuine historical ern branches of the nation, and to have spread tradition, there is no reason to doubt that the westward no farther than the shores of the south of Italy received at least a part of its Pe- Adriatic. lasgian population from Epirus, as the occurrence of the same local names in the two countries naturally suggests.* But, whatever un-gians to the Greeks, also obstructs our inquicertainty may hang over this subject, it does ries when we endeavour to determine the denot affect the main point, the existence of a gree of civilization they had attained before people in Italy, who were either called Pelas- they became a Hellenic people, and the steps gians, or were known as such by their national by which they rose to it. In this respect, as in features, of language, manners, or religion, and others, they present two aspects, which it is were very widely diffused over the peninsula. not easy to reconcile, and neither of which can That they were confined to the northern part, be shown to be absolutely false. Some ac or to Etruria, is an opinion depending on a con- counts represent their original condition as ne jecture supported by no authority: that Arca- better than that of mere savages, strangers dia was originally peopled by two entirely dif- even to the simplest arts of life, and to the first ferent races, the one Pelasgian, the other allied necessaries of civilized society: others imply to the Greeks, and that the latter sent out col- that, in the very earliest period of their settleonies to the south of Italy, while the former re-ment in Greece, they had already reached a mained at home, until the last remnant that much higher stage of humanity. In the history preserved the national name and character mi- of their progress, too, there is an important vagrated along with the Ionians into Asia. These riation; for, according to one view, it was gradArcadian colonies are indeed extremely doubt-ual and spontaneous; according to another, it ful, 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 ped-jects, we are perplexed by the difficulty of disigree; 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. If this is the 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 MuGeum, No. I. + Steph. Byz., Xios. He says that the Italian Greeks 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 civilized people. When we consult the testimonies of the ancient authors on these sub tinguishing between genuine tradition and the artificial results of philosophical or historical speculation. So it is with the legends of Arcadia and Attica; two regions, to which, as the reputed seats of a Pelasgian population, which was never exterminated, we should be inclined treated the Pelasgians as the Lacedæmonians did their Helots, the Argives their Gymnesians, the Sicyonians their Corynephori, the Cretans their Mnoitæ. See Niebuhr, i., p. 29. their reception, the forests already cleared, the swamps drained, and those great works accomplished which were ascribed to the power of Hercules, or Poseidon, and without which many tracts could never have been habitable, they must have been long engaged in a struggle with nature, which would detain them in a condition very inferior to that of their Argive brethren. The legends of the two countries appear to indicate that such was the case. It would be an equally narrow view of the Pelasgians to conceive that they were solely addicted to agricultural pursuits. Even if it were not highly prob to look for the purest traditional evidence. In | sity for supposing that all the Pelasgian tribes Arcadia, King Pelasgus, the earth's first-born, stood in this respect on the same level, and teaches his people to build rude huts, and to were equally favoured by nature and fortune. clothe themselves with skins, such as were If some were attracted by the fertility of the worn in some parts of Greece down to the la- broad plains, others might be tempted by the test times; and to substitute the fruit of the security of the mountain-valleys, and thus Aroak, which was long the characteristic food of cadia may have been peopled as early as Argos the country, for the leaves and wild herbs on by the same race. And yet, unless the Arcawhich they had before subsisted. His son, Ly-dian settlers found their new seats prepared for caon, founds the first city, Lycosura; and it is not before the reign of Arcas, the fourth from Pelasgus, who gave his name to the country, that the Arcadians learned the use of bread, and began to exchange their boar-skins for woollen garments.* It can hardly be believed that this picture is anything more than a sketch, traced by the understanding, and filled up by the imagination, of the order in which useful discoveries and inventions may be supposed to have succeeded each other in a primitive community. But if it were possible to treat it as containing any touch of historical truth, it would still be doubtful whether the Pelasgians oughtable that a part of the nation crossed the sea to to be regarded as giving or receiving the benefits of civilized life; and we should be as little justified in inferring that they themselves emerged from a savage state, as in drawing the like conclusion from the Italian legend, which re-acquired them. Accordingly, the islands of the lates that Italus introduced husbandry among his subjects, the notrians. So, too, when the Pelasgians of Attica are described as originally plunged in the grossest barbarism, there is strong reason to suspect that it has only been attributed to them for the sake of heightening the contrast between them and the foreign settlers, who in the same accounts are said to have reclaimed them.‡ reach the shores of Greece, and thus brought with them the rudiments of the arts connected with navigation, it would be incredible that the tribes seated on the coast should not soon have Egean are peopled by Pelasgians, the piracies of the Leleges precede the rise of the first maritime power among the Greeks, and the Tyrsenian Pelasgians are found infesting the seas after the fall of Troy. To know that a nation which has any fair claim to affinity with the Greeks was not, at any period to which probable tradition goes back, a horde of helpless savages, is in itself Other traditions, not so liable to distrust, con- not unimportant. The same evidence which cur in assigning tillage and useful arts to the disposes us to believe that the Pelasgians spoke Pelasgians as their proper and original pursuits. a language nearly akin to the Hellenic, must We are told that they loved to settle on the render us willing to admit that, before they rich soil of alluvial plains: hence the name and came into contact with any foreign people in the legend of Piasus, who reigned over the Pe- Greece, they may have tilled the ground, plantlasgians in the valley of the Hermus, and grew ed the vine, launched their boats on the sea, wanton from the exuberant increase of the dwelt together in walled towns, and honoured land. So, in Thessaly, the waters have no the gods, as authors of their blessings, with fessooner been discharged by the earthquake which tive rights and sacred songs. And it is satisrent Ossa and Olympus asunder, than Pelasgus factory to find that all this, if not clearly ascerhastens to take possession of the newly-discov-tained, is at least consistent with the general ered territory, and the happy event is celebra-tenour of ancient tradition. But even this is ted in a yearly festival with loaded boards. The powers that preside over husbandry, and protect the fruits of the earth, and the growth of the flocks and herds, appear to have been the eldest Pelasgian deities. It is, therefore, not an improbable conjecture, that the genuine and most ancient form of the national name was expressive of this character. And perhaps this might explain how, having been at first confined to some fortunate and industrious tribes, which cultivated the most fruitful tracts, it came to be widely diffused, without superseding those which prevailed elsewhere. But, as has been already observed, there is no neces * Pans., viii., 4, 1; iv., 11, 3. + Aristot., Pol., vii., 9. Eudocia, under the article Cecrops. Strabo, xiii., 621. Athen., xiv., p. 689. The Peloria. Heλapyoi (from apyos and new), inhabitants or cultirators of the plain. Mueller (Orchom., p. 125, n. 6) connects this with the name Peloria, the feast of the settlers. Yet the analogy of airódos, rauponóλos, &c., seems unfavourable to this etymology far from giving us a notion of the precise point of civilization to which the Pelasgians had advanced before the Greeks overtook and outstripped them, and still less does it disclose any peculiar features in their national character. Fully to discuss the former of these subjects, it would be necessary to enter into a very wide and arduous field of inquiry, and to examine the pretensions set up on behalf of the Pelasgians to the art of writing, to religious mysteries, and to a theological literature. But as this would lead us away from our main object, it will be better to reserve these questions till we are called upon to notice them so far as they bear on the progress of society among the Greeks. For the present, we shall only touch on one subject, which affords us surer ground for observation, and perhaps the best measure for judging of the condition and character of the Pelasgians. The most ancient architectural monuments in Europe, which may, perhaps, outlast all that have been reared in later ages, |