him they were termed by Homer " ßapßapópwvo," not because their language was altogether foreign to the Greek, but as speaking impure Greek, the Carians often serving through Greece as stipendiary soldiers. In Greece the Locrians were, by authors of undoubted credit, and by a general consent, derived from the Leleges.* The Locrians were accounted Greeks, and it seems evident that the original people of Caria, Crete, and the islands, and of many parts of Lesser Asia, were tribes not remotely foreign to the Grecian race. Among these ancient races the Pelasgi were the most conspicuous: their fame eclipsed that of the contemporary tribes, and we find them by some writers mentioned as the sole primitive inhabitants of Greece. Thessaly was a Pelasgian country. Niebuhr terms it the second great seat of the Pelasgic people. A part of Thessaly retained till the latest times the name of Pelasgiotis. The Thessalian Larissa was a Pelasgian settlement. By Homer, either the whole plain of Thessaly or a part of it was termed the Pelasgian Argos. The name of Argos, as we are assured by Strabo, meant in the language of Thessaly a plain or land of tillage. It seems to have been a designation given to the level country both in Thessaly and in Peloponnesus. In Attica the tribe of Argadeis were tillers of the plain, as the Ægicoreis were goatherds of the mountains. Another Pelasgic name, that of Larissa, belonged to many Pelasgic towns or fortresses. The Aúpiora ipibuλat of Homer is supposed to have belonged to the Pelasgi settled in the plain of Troas, who were allies of Priam in the Trojan war, and Strabo has mentioned three Larissas in Asia which have been thought likely to be the town mentioned in the Iliad. Besides the Thessalian Larissa, there were places bearing the same name in Crete, in Attica, in Peloponnesus, near Mitylene, and near Mount Ossa. Strabo has probably given the true explanation of this fact in the remark, that the towns called by that name were situated So Strabo, following Aristotle; also Dionys. of Halicarnassus, lib. i. cap. xvii. Scymnus Chius and Dicæarchus mention the same fact. See Falconer's Notes on Strabo, tom. ii. p. 466. of the Oxford edition. 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 Æschylus 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 Æschylus, 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 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 Heracleida, 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 ""Apradeç 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 dévTepov-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. |