on alluvions near the mouths of rivers, as those of Caystrus, Hermus, and Peneus. By these two names of Argos and Larissa, Pelasgian settlements are to be recognised, as Niebuhr and others have observed, in various parts of Greece and the neighbouring countries.

The Pelasgi are represented as possessing many other parts of European Greece besides Thessaly. The Peloponnesus is universally acknowledged to have belonged to them from immemorial time. Thus they are described by Eschylus in a celebrated passage of the Supplices. In this the poet introduces Pelasgus, the king of the aboriginal Greeks, as addressing Danaus, who arrives with a foreign colony in the Peloponnesus. He claims the sovereignty of all Greece, comprehending the peninsula and the mainland as far northward as the Strymon in Thrace and the river Algos either in Illyria or in Macedonia. If the boundaries of Pelasgia, as described by Eschylus, are geographically correct, that name must have extended, as Niebuhr has observed, over the whole of Greece. The passage is as follows:

Τοῦ γηγενοῦς γάρ εἰμ' ἐγὼ Παλαίχθονος
ἴνις Πελασγὸς, τῆσδε γῆς ἀρχηγέτης,
ἐμοῦ δ ̓ ἅνακτος εὐλόγως ἐπώνυμον

γένος Πελασγῶν τήνδε καρποῦται χθόνα.

Pelasgus is well known to have been a mythical person representing the native people of Peloponnesus, and especially of Arcadia. His name stands at the head of the list of Arcadian kings given by Pausanias, and the story of his birth from the Grecian soil is found again in a passage of the ancient poet Asius of Samos,+ cited likewise by Pausanias:

̓Αντιθεόν τε Πελασγὸν ἐν ὑψικόμοις ὀρέεσσι

Γαῖα μέλαιν' ἀνέδωκεν, ἵνα θνητῶν γένος εἴη.

'The black earth brought forth the godlike Pelasgus that the race of mortals might have existence.'

It is important to take notice of the reason why the Pelasgic name, spread as it had been through various parts of

Strabon. lib. ix. p. 440. Idem, lib. xiii. p. 620.

+ Asius of Samos is supposed to have lived as early as the beginning of the Olympiads.

Greece, continued to be associated with Arcadia. That country being a mountainous tract in the interior of the peninsula, retained its original population unmixed, while the parts near the coast are said to have undergone revolutions and to have received foreign colonies. For this fact we have the express assurance of Thucydides, who mentions it as well known and fully admitted, that Arcadia always retained its old inhabitants amidst all the changes of population which other parts of Greece underwent. We learn from Aristophanes that this was the popular opinion in Greece, and that the Arcadians were derided, as if they claimed to be older than the moon. Herodotus has given the same information

in the notices which he has collected and handed down respecting the origin of the rites of Grecian superstition. "The ceremonies termed Thesmophoria were," as he declares, "brought from Egypt by the daughters of Danaus, and by them revealed to the Pelasgian women; but in after times, when the people from all the rest of the Peloponnesus were driven out by the Dorians, this mystery fell into disuse. Those among the Peloponnesians," he adds, "who remained and were not driven out, namely, the Arcadians, alone preserved them."* To the Arcadians, however, Strabo adds the inhabitants of Elis: he says, "The former were a people of the mountains, and their country did not fall under the lot which divided the rest of Peloponnesus among the Heracleids: the latter were deemed sacred to Olympic Jupiter, and long remained in peace; they had given entertainment to Oxylus, at the return of the Heracleidæ, and were therefore left unmolested." Strabo adds, that these two nations retained the old language of the native Peloponnesians, while the people of other parts underwent changes greater or less in their idiom. What this old Peloponnesian and, as it would appear, old Pelasgian language was, we shall presently inquire.

In other parts of Peloponnesus it was reported that the people had been Pelasgian before the arrival of foreigners in

* Herod. lib. ii. The same writer, in enumerating several of the nations of the Peloponnesus who joined the Ionian migration, terms the Arcadians “*Apkades Πελασγοί.”

troduced new names and new divisions. In the drama of Orestes by Euripides, the people of Argos are thus addressed: ὦ γῆν Ινάχου κεκτημένοι,

πάλαι Πελασγοί, Δαναΐδαι δὲ δεύτερον.

"O you who possess the land of Inachus, formerly Pelasgi, but afterwards called Danaidæ.'

Paragraph 4.-Transition to the Hellenic name.

We must now come to the question, at what period did the inhabitants of Greece cease to be termed Pelasgi, and what occasioned the change? When were they Hellenes or Greeks, and were the Hellenes a new population or the old one under a different name?

We have seen that the Pelasgi were, according to an extensively spread tradition, the true aborigines of Greece, the indigenous people, born from the soil according to the prevalent notion of antiquity. There seems to have been not the slightest notion of any previous inhabitants.

Thucydides has observed that the people of Greece were not termed Hellenes till after the Homeric age. He intimates that this was the result of political changes. The only Hellenes known to Homer were the followers of Achilles from Phthiotis. From them this name was spread by the influence of military alliances to the tribes of Thessaly. How it came long afterwards to become the national designation of the Greeks, Thucydides apparently knew not: he has expressed a doubtful opinion on this point, upon which Herodotus has touched with equal reserve. One thing is clear: neither of these writers supposed that any expulsion of the old inhabitants of Greece had taken place on this occasion, but only the substitution of a new name, the result of some political revolutions. We hear of no other event in the history of Greece with which it can be associated, but the Dorian conquest and the return of the Heracleids. However this may have been, the Homeric nations, before the Hellenic period or the prevalence of the Hellenic name, were named, as Thucydides says, after some leading tribe, sometimes Achivi, Danai, Argivi. These nations, the Homeric Greeks, were assuredly the same people who were afterwards termed Hel

lenes. But were they the same people as the Pelasgi? Homer never terms them Pelasgi: his Pelasgi were only some particular tribes; and when Thucydides says that of old the Pelasgian name had been the most widely extended in Greece, he must refer to an earlier age.

The period at which the inhabitants of Greece were termed chiefly Pelasgi is clearly apparent from some passages already cited. The people of Argos were πάλαι Πελασγοί, Δαναΐδαι δὲ dévrepov—they were Pelasgi till the settlement of foreigners among them, and by Herodotus, as above cited, the same thing is asserted of the Arcadians.

Paragraph 5.—Of the Greek language, and of the language of the Pelasgi.

The Greek language presents in its own structure a conclusive refutation of an hypothesis which represents it as of mixed formation. It displays unequivocal marks of a genuine and primitive origin, and, as Wachsmuht observes, "the strength of pure and unmixed growth, so that the subsequent external accessions, the few foreign expressions by the side of a stock of words naturally and regularly derived from simple roots, appear insulated, and incapable of transfusing themselves into the inner essence and genius of the language." With regard to the similarity of idiom among the single tribes, which as the result of a common origin may be traced even in the modifications of its dialects, Homer's testimony, and the inference to be drawn from his emphatical mention of the harsh language of the Carians and Sintians, are deserving of particular attention. It may safely be denied that either the simple elements of the language, or a supply of already matured forms, could have been brought with them by foreigners, which afterwards prevailed to such an extent as to supplant an anterior language in Greece.

The Greek language was then a nearly unmixed idiom, elaborated from primitive elements, which, however, were common to it and to many other Indo-European idioms both in the east and west. The laws of inflection and developement are likewise common in many instances to the Greek, the Sanskrit, Latin, and Moso-Gothic.

What then was the language of the Pelasgi? Herodotus confesses his inability to solve this question in a satisfactory manner, but he says that if he could draw an inference from the idiom spoken in certain Pelasgian towns upon the Hellespont, it must have been barbaric, that is, not Greek. The Pelasgi inhabiting Crestona,* in the inland country above the Tyrrheni, on the coast of Thrace, who, as he says, had previously dwelt in Thessaly near the Dorians, and another Pelasgian tribe, who had colonised Placia and Scylace on the Hellespont, having previously been neighbours of the Athenians, as well as the people of some other Pelasgic towns, were unintelligible to all their neighbours; yet the inhabitants or Crestona understood those of Placia. From this it seems a very reasonable inference that the Pelasgic language was different from the Greek. Yet this conclusion is so fully contradicted by all that we know of the early history of Greece, that it cannot be admitted in its full and more obvious meaning.

The tribes mentioned by Herodotus were the last relics of the Pelasgian name: and the Pelasgians who at this late period spoke a peculiar idiom, must have acquired this difference or peculiarity of their speech in the course of a long

Crestona, as every reader of ancient history well knows, has been conjectured to have been a place not in Thrace or in the neighbourhood of Mount Athos, but to be erroneously written instead of Croton in Umbria, which the Pelasgi are said to have conquered; and Herodotus is supposed to say that the Pelasgi of Placia, on the Hellespont, spoke the same language as the Pelasgi in the interior of Northern Italy. This notion was first suggested by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who probably quoted Herodotus from very imperfect recollection. It was adopted by Count Caylus, the author of a very elaborate but fanciful work on Etruscan Antiquities. Larcher thought it scarcely worthy of refutation, but the learned Niebuhr embraced and defended the hypothesis. The question, if I may venture to express an opinion, has been finally settled by K. Otfried Müller, who observed that there were two places in Thrace, of which the names are essentially the same, though different in form from that of the Herodotean Crotona, and that the Crestonian land (rò Kpnoτwviкòv), according to Thucydides, reached into the peninsula of Athos. This, it can hardly be doubted, was the place meant by Herodotus: since it lay precisely, as he says, beyond the Tyrrheni, namely, beyond or above the district where in fact Thucydides places the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi. It is extremely improbable that Herodotus made an allusion here to a distant place in Northern Italy, with the language of which, as even of its existence, it is unlikely that he had the most remote acquaintance, especially as he appears to have made no reference whatever to Italy, but was employed in discussing the relations of eastern tribes, and of the people on the Hellespont.