I must not, however, pass from the subject of Homeric testimony respecting the Pelasgi, without adverting to one important negative part of it.
It must be observed, that, as anterior to the three appellatives which he ordinarily applies to the Greeks of the Trojan war collectively, Homer uses no name whatever other than the Pelasgic, which is not of limited and local application. Neither Ἀχαιοὶ, Ἀργεῖοι, nor Δαναοὶ, bear any one sign of being the proper designation of the original settlers and inhabitants of all Greece: and if the name for them be not Πελασγοὶ, there certainly is no other name whatever which can compete for the honour, none which has the same marks at once of great antiquity, and of covering a wide range of the country. And if, as I trust, it shall hereafter be shown, that all these came from abroad as strangers into a country already occupied, there then will be a presumption of no mean force arising even out of this negative, to the effect that the Pelasgians were the original base of the Greek nation, while we are also entitled to affirm, upon the evidence of Homer, that their race extended beyond the limits of Greece.
Such is the supposition upon which we already begin to find that the testimony of the poems as a whole appears to converge. It is, I grant, indirect, and fragmentary, and much of it conjectural; we may greatly enlarge its quantity from sources not yet opened: but I wish to direct particular attention to its unity and harmony, to the multitude of indications which, though separate and individually slight, all coincide with the theory that the Pelasgi supplied the substratum of the Greek population subsisting under dominant Hellic influences; and to the fact, I would almost venture to add, that they can coincide with nothing else.
We must proceed, however, to consider that portion of the evidence in the case, which is external to the Homeric Poems.
Besides what has been up to this point incidentally touched, there is a great mass of extra-Homeric testimony, which tends, when read in the light of Homer, to corroborate the views which have here been taken of the Pelasgi, as one of the main coefficients of the Greek nation.
In the first chapter of the able work of Bishop Marsh, entitled, Horæ Pelasgicæ[355], will be found an ample collection of passages from Greek writers, which, though many of them are in themselves slight, and any one if taken singly could be of little weight for the purpose of proof, yet collectively indicate that the possession of the entire country at the remotest period by the Pelasgi was little less than an universal and invariable tradition. I will here collect some portion of the evidence which may be cited to this effect.
Coming next to Homer in time and in authority, Hesiod supports him, as we have seen above[356], in associating Dodona both with the Pelasgic and with the Hellic races; placing it, just as Homer does, in the midst of the latter, and more distinctly than Homer indicating its foundation by the former. It may be observed that, in a Fragment, he questionably personifies Pelasgus[357].
Next we find the very ancient poet Asius, according to the quotation of Pausanias[358], assigning the very highest antiquity to the Pelasgian race, by making Pelasgus the father of men;
Among the Greek writers, not being historians themselves, of the historic period, there is none whose testimony bears, to my perception, so much of the true archaic stamp, as Æschylus. It seems as if we could trace in him a greater piety towards Homer, and we certainly find a more careful regard both to his characters and his facts, than were afterwards commonly paid to them. Nay he excels in this respect the Cyclic poets. They were much nearer in date to the great master, but he, as it were, outran them, by a deeper and nobler sympathy. In him, too, the drama had not yet acquired the character, which effaces or impairs its claims to historical authority: which earned for it the ἐκτραγῳδεῖν of Aristotle[359] and Polybius[360], and on which was founded the declaration of Socrates in the Minos, Ἀττικὸν λέγεις μῦθον καὶ τραγικόν[361]. Even where he speaks allegorically, he seems to represent the first form of allegory, in which it is traceably moulded upon history, and serves for its key. It is not therefore unreasonable to attach importance to his rendering of the public tradition respecting the Pelasgi, which we find in a remarkable passage of the Supplices;
Pelasgus, himself the speaker, then describes his dominions as reaching from Peloponnesus (χώρη Ἀπίη) in the south to the river Strymon in the north (πρὸς δύνοντος ἡλίου), and declares how Apis, coming from Acarnania, had fitted the country for the abode of man by clearing it of wild beasts. Acarnania marks the line of country, which formed the ordinary route from Thessaly to Peloponnesus. Taken literally, Pelasgus is the son of the Earthborn, and the name-giver of the Pelasgian race. What the passage signifies evidently is, that by ancient tradition the Pelasgians were the first occupants of the country, and that they reached from the north to the south of Greece. It is in the reign of this mythical Pelasgus, that Danaus reaches the Peloponnesus.
Of such an eponymus Thessaly, Argos, and Arcadia had each their separate tradition in its appropriate dress. Pausanias reports the Arcadian one very fully: and according to its tenour Pelasgus taught the use of dwellings and clothes, and to eat chestnuts instead of roots, grass, and leaves[363]. The tomb of Pelasgus was pretended to be shown at Argos.
Herodotus states that the Hellas of his day was formerly called Πελασγία[364]: gives to the Peloponnesian women of the era of Danaus the name of Πελασγιωτίδες γυναῖκες[365]: he denominates the Arcadians Πελασγοὶ Ἀρκάδες[366], the people of what was afterwards Achaia Πελασγοὶ Αἰγιαλέες[367], the Athenians Πελασγοὶ Κραναοὶ[368], whom also he describes as autochthonic[369]: and he shows, that recollections of the Pelasgian worship were preserved in his day at Dodona[370]. He furthermore mentions the Πελασγικὸν τεῖχος[371] at Athens; and he places the Pelasgian race in Samothrace, and Lemnos, and mentions their settlements upon the Hellespont, named Placia and Scylace.
Thucydides describes the spot or building called Πελασγικὸν under the Acropolis at Athens, the very situation, in which the original town would in all likelihood be placed for safety. This historian also sustains, with the weight of his judgment, the opinion that in pre-Hellenic times the prevailing race and name in Greece were Pelasgic; κατὰ ἔθνη δὲ ἄλλα τε καὶ τὸ Πελασγικὸν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον[372].
It is true, that in another passage[373], among the races of the βάρβαροι, he enumerates the Pelasgi: but the epithet itself, which was wholly inapplicable to the heroic age, shows that he spoke with reference to the demarcation established in his own time, which made every thing barbarous that was not Greek, either geographically or by known derivation. Barbarian with him and his contemporaries meant simply foreign, with the addition of a strong dash of depreciation. The full-grown Hellenic character no longer owned kindred with the particular races, which nevertheless might have contributed, each in its own time and place, to the formation of that remarkable product. The relationship is, however, established by Thucydides himself; for he says these Pelasgi were of the same Tyrseni, who occupied Athens at an earlier period.
Theocritus, who flourished early in the third century B. C., has a passage where he distinguishes chronologically between different persons and races. He begins with the heroes of the Troica, and then goes back to the ἔτι πρότεροι, in which capacity he names the Lapithæ, the Deucalidæ, the Pelopids, and lastly the Ἄργεος ἄκρα Πελασγοί[374]. The word ἄκρα might mean either (1) the flower of Greece, or (2) the very oldest and earliest inhabitants of Greece[375]. Now as the Pelasgians were by no means the flower of Greece, we can only choose the latter meaning for this particular passage. The word Ἄργος is perhaps taken here in its largest sense[376].
Apollonius Rhodius, nearly a century later, adheres to part at least of the same tradition, and calls Thessaly the πολυλήïος αἶα Πελασγῶν[377]. The Scholiast on this passage adds an older testimony, stating that Sophocles, in the Inachus, declared that the Πελασγοὶ and Ἀργεῖοι were the same.
According to Strabo, the Pelasgi were the most ancient race which had held power in Greece: τῶν περὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα δυναστευσάντων ἀρχαιότατοι[378]. In the same place he calls the oracle of Dodona Πελασγῶν ἵδρυμα, a Pelasgian foundation. He expressly supports the construction which has been given above to the Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος of Homer[379], in the words τὸ Πελασγικὸν Ἄργος ἡ Θετταλία λέγεται, and he defines the country by the Peneus, Pindus, and Thermopylæ. He traces the Pelasgi in a multitude of particular places, and, on the authority of Ephorus, mentions Πελασγία as a name of Peloponnesus. He also gives us that fragment of Euripides, which states, in harmony with the testimony of Æschylus, that Danaus came to Greece, founded the city of Inachus, and changed the name of the inhabitants from Pelasgiotes to Danaans.
And Strabo considers that both the Pelasgiote and the Danaan name, together with that of the Hellenes, were covered by the Argive or Argeian name on account of the fame, to which the city of Argos rose[380].
The writings of Dionysius of Halicarnassus probably represent all, that a sound judgment could gather from the records and traditions extant in his time[381]. He pronounces confidently, that the Pelasgian race was Hellenic; which I take to mean, that it was one of the component parts of the body afterwards called Hellenic, not that the early Pelasgi were included among the early Hellenes. He considers that the race came from Peloponnesus, where many believed it to be autochthonic, into Thessaly, under Achæus, Phthius, and Pelasgus. It was unfortunate, as in other respects, so in being driven to frequent migrations. This idea of the frequent displacement of the Pelasgians was probably the product in the main of the two facts, first, that traces of them were found at many widely separated points, and secondly, that, according to tradition, they had sunk into a position of inferiority.
K. O. Müller, proceeding chiefly on the post-Homeric tradition, has strongly summed up the evidence as to the Pelasgi, to the following effect.
They were the original inhabitants of the plains and flat bottoms of the valleys, any one of which the ancients called by the name Ἄργος, as we see by the plains of the Peneus, and of the Inachus. If, as Strabo holds, this use of the word was in his time modern, and Macedonian or Thessalian, it may still have been a revival of a primitive usage, even as the very old word Γραικὸς had come back into use with the Alexandrian poets, through the old common tongue of Macedonia.
Their oldest towns were the Larissæ[382], and the number of these points out the Pelasgians as a city-founding people, expert in raising considerable and durable structures. These Larissæ were upon alluvial soils by rivers, and the Pelasgians were early diggers of canals[383]. Their pursuits were agricultural; hence they occupy the richest soils: hence Pelasgus is the host of Ceres, and the inventor of bread: hence Tyrrhenian Pelasgi convert the stony ground by Hymettus into fruitful fields. The shepherd life of the Pelasgians is an Arcadian tradition, but Arcadia was not their only original seat, and, when displaced by Achæans and Dorians, they may have been driven to the hills. Such seats we find in Argos, Achaia, Peloponnesus generally, Thessalia, Epirus, and Attica, where they may be traced in the division of the tribes.
Treating as an error the tradition of their vagrant character, he conceives them to be generally and above all autochthonic. He quotes from Asius in Pausanias the lines which have already been quoted.
There is no record, he says, of their coming into Greece by colonization. They are a people distinct, he thinks, from Lelegians and Carians, as well as from the northern immigrants, Achæans, and Thessalians: and they are the basis and groundwork of the Greek nation[384].
In Niebuhr[385] will be found a comprehensive outline of the wide range of Pelasgian occupancy in Italy: and Cramer supplies a similar sketch for Asia Minor and for Greece[386].
I forbear to quote Latin authorities as to the Pelasgi of Greece. The strong Pelasgian character of Magna Græcia will of itself naturally account for the free use of the name by Romans to designate the Greek nation, and cannot therefore greatly serve to show even the later tradition concerning the ancient position of the Pelasgians in Greece, and their relations to its other inhabitants.
Marsh appears to assert too much, when he says that we may set down as peculiarly Pelasgian those places which retained the Pelasgian name in the historic ages. It does not follow from this retention, that Placia and Scylace were more genuinely Pelasgian than Thessaly, any more than we are entitled to say from Homer, that Thessaly was originally more Pelasgian than Attica or Peloponnesus, though it retained the name longer. The reason may have been, that no such powerful pressure from a superior race was brought to bear in the one class of cases, as in the other[387].
In holding that the Pelasgians were the base, so to speak, of the Greek nation, I mean to indicate it as a probable opinion, that they continued to form the mass of the inhabitants throughout all the changes of name which succeeded the period of their rule. But it would appear, that a succession of other more vigorous influences from the Hellic stock must have contributed far more powerfully in all respects, excepting as to numbers, to compose and shape the nationality of the people. The chief part of the Pelasgians of Attica may perhaps have lain among the 400,000 slaves, who formed the unheeded herd of its population; much as in Italy the serfs of the Greek colonists bore the Pelasgian name[388]. So large a body could scarcely have been formed in that limited territory, except out of the original inhabitants of the country. In early stages of society the bulk of society takes its impress from one, or from a few, of superior force: and the ruling families and tribes of a smaller, but more energetic and warlike race, finding for themselves a natural place at the head of societies already constituted, assume the undisputed direction of their fortunes, and become, by a spontaneous law, their sole representatives in the face of the world, and in the annals of its history.
We may, however, find no inconsiderable proof of the presence of a strong Pelasgian element in the Greek nation, in that portion of the evidence upon the case which is supplied by language. Those numerous and important words in the Latin tongue, which correspond with the words belonging to the same ideas in Greek, could only have come from the Pelasgian ancestry common to both countries; and, if coming from them, must demonstrate in the one case, as in the other, the strong Pelasgian tincture of the nation.
And as the language of a country cannot be extensively impregnated in this manner, except either by numbers, or by political and social ascendancy (as was the case of the French tongue with the English), or by literary influence (as is now the case with us in respect to the Greek and Latin tongues), we must ask to which of these causes it was owing, that the Pelasgians so deeply marked the Greek language with the traces of their own tongue. It was not literary influence, for we may be sure that there existed none. It was not political ascendancy, for they were either enslaved, or at the least subordinate. It could only be the influence of their numbers, through which their manner of speech could in any measure hold its ground; and thus we arrive again at the conclusion, that they must have supplied the substratum of the nation.
It is true that Herodotus, as well as Thucydides, spoke of the Pelasgians as using a foreign tongue. So a German writer would naturally describe the English, and yet the English language, by one of its main ingredients, bears conclusive testimony to the Saxon element of the English nation, and also illustrates the relative positions, which the Saxon and Norman races are known in history to have occupied. The tongue of the Pelasgians had been subject within Greece to influence and admixture from the language of the Hellic tribes: beyond Greece it had received impressions from different sources; and naturally, after the consequences of this severance had worked for centuries, the speech of the Pelasgians would be barbarous in the eyes of the Greeks. Again, Marsh[389] observes that, in the very chapter where he distinguishes Pelasgic from Hellenic, Herodotus (i. 56) declares the Ionians to belong to one of these stocks, the Dorians to the other: both of which populations were in his time undoubtedly Greek. And the historian gives another strong proof that the Pelasgians were Greek, where he assigns to this parentage (ii. 52) the Greek name of the gods: θεοὺς δὲ προσωνόμασάν σφεας ἀπὸ τοῦ τοιούτου, ὅτι κόσμῳ θέντες τὰ πάντα πρήγματα κ.τ.λ.
Even if we suppose, as may have been the case, that the Pelasgi mentioned by Herodotus, and by Thucydides, spoke a tongue as far from the Greek actually known to either of them, as is German from the English language at the present day, yet by its affinities that tongue might still remain a conclusive proof, that the ancestors of those who spoke it must have formed an essential ingredient in the composition of the nation. The evidence, which we know to be good in the one case, might be equally valid in the other.
There is abundance of testimony among authors, both Greek and Roman, to establish the relation of the Pelasgi to the old forms of the language of both countries. It is enough for the present to refer to the Second Chapter of Bishop Marsh’s Horæ Pelasgicæ for a very able and satisfactory discussion of the question. I shall presently have to consider the particular complexion of the words which the Greek nation appear to have derived from Pelasgic sources, and the inferences which that complexion suggests. But this will best be done, when we have examined into the Homeric import of the Hellenic and Pelasgian proper names.
We have next to examine the question,
By what route is it most probable that this Pelasgian nation came into Greece?
On this subject there can hardly be any other than one of two suppositions: the first, that by Thrace, or by the islands of the north, they reached Thessaly: the other, that they crossed from Asia, to the south of the Ægean, by the islands which divide the spaces of that sea.
It is observed by Cramer[390], that the prevailing opinion among those ancient writers, who have discussed the subject, places the Pelasgians first in the Peloponnesus: this being maintained by Pherecydes, Ephorus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Pausanias, without any dissentients to oppose them. This tradition evidently favours the opinion of a passage by the south.
Dionysius, who may be regarded as summing up the general results of Greek tradition, says[391] it placed the Pelasgians first in the Peloponnesus as autochthons; and represented them as having migrated to Thessaly in the sixth generation. In six generations more, they were, he conceives, expelled by the Ætolians and Locrians, then called Curetes and Leleges, and were dispersed into various quarters: indeed, here the tradition seems to become wholly vague or mythical, and to have gathered into one mass most of the places in which there appeared signs of Pelasgic occupancy: it includes the report of a great migration to Italy.
Marsh[392] considers Thrace as the original seat in Europe of the Pelasgi; but the data on which he proceeds are too narrow; they have reference only to the islands of Lemnus, Imbrus, and Samothrace. There is no evidence of Pelasgians on the Continent to the north of the Ægean except what places them at a distance from Troy (τῆλε Hom. Il. xvii. 301), and if so, at a point which they may have reached from those islands, more probably, than by the continental route. It is on the whole more likely, however, that Pelasgians may have found their way into Greece both by the north (and if so, probably through the islands), and also by the south.
Homer affords no materials for conclusively determining the question. He gives us the Pelasgic name established in Thessaly, which favours our supposing the one passage, and likewise in Crete, which favours the other. He gives us the Pelasgic Jove of Dodona (a very weighty piece of testimony), and the τέμενος of Ceres in Thessaly, telling rather for the first; and he likewise gives us a perceptible connection between Ceres and Crete, and between Jupiter and king Minos, verging to the latter. But it is to be observed that, with the exception of Attica, the chief Homeric tokens of Pelasgianism lie in Northern and in Southern, but not in Middle, Greece: which favours the opinion, that there may have been a double line of entry.
The extra-Homeric tradition is on the whole most favourable to the supposition of a southern route. Hesiod makes Dodona in Thessaly Pelasgian, but distinctly associates Ceres with Crete: and the Theogony (479, 80) sends Jupiter as an infant to be reared in Crete. The Hymn to Ceres, as we have seen, brings her from thence to Eleusis; and the popular mythology in general treats that island as the cradle of Jupiter, therefore manifestly as the place from which the Greeks derived his worship. More than this; the tradition makes Peloponnesus the seat and centre of Pelasgic power, as we see from Æschylus, who makes Pelasgus reside in Peloponnesus, but rule as far as Macedonia. So likewise the names both of Ἀπίη γαῖα and of Ἰασὸν Ἄργος connect themselves originally with this part of Greece: especially when we consider that Apis in Egypt is the sacred bull, and that agriculture, the characteristic pursuit of the Pelasgians, was also the business of oxen. Again, Herodotus[393] reports that the local tradition of Dodona assigned to that oracle an Egyptian origin; and as Dodona was Pelasgic, this tradition somewhat favours the hypothesis of entry by the south.
There are several allusions in Homer to Crete, to Cyprus, or to both, as marking the route between Greece and Asia. Menelaus, after quitting Troy, and nearing Crete (Od. iii. 285-92), sailed afar
The pseudo-Ulysses sails from Crete to Egypt[395], and returns thence to Phœnicia, in one tale, and afterwards starts for Libya by Crete; in another legend, he is given over from Egypt to Cyprus; and Antinous[396], in the Seventeenth Odyssey, replying to the supposed beggar-man, says, Get out of the way,
We already know the connection of Crete with Greece from the Iliad: and thus it appears as on the high road from Greece to Phœnicia, and by Phœnicia to Egypt. The unexampled populousness of that island would, as a matter of course, beget migration; and, of all the tracts lying to the west of the Ægean, the Thessalian plain would, from its extent, offer perhaps the greatest encouragement to agricultural settlers. The traditions reported by Herodotus from Dodona connect that place closely with Egypt and the East, and the route now supposed by Crete establishes that connection in what is probably the simplest and most obvious line.
The continental country from Thessaly to the north and east was held as it would appear to a great extent by a martial and highland race Θρῇκες and Θρηίκιοι. It is not likely that the Pelasgians had much in common with that people, or could make their way to Greece either with or in despite of them. Perhaps the coast where we find Cicones and Pæones apart from the Thracians, may have afforded a route, and we must remember the traditional traces of them both on the coast of the Hellespont and in the islands[397].
This may be the place most convenient for observing, that there can be little hesitation in regarding the northern route as that by which the Hellic tribes came into Greece. They, a highland people, came along a mountain country. They left their name upon the Hellespont, the sea of Helle, which means not the mere strait so called in later times, but the whole northern Ægean[398]; and upon the river Selleeis, which discharges itself into the sea of Marmora. We first hear of them in Homer at the extreme north of Thessaly: then we find them giving their name, Hellas, to that country, or to some part of it. The people of Hellas, when their connection with their sires of the mountain had become faint in comparison with their relation to the territory they occupied, called themselves Hellenes, from the region they inhabited; and lost sight, as it were, of the ruder parent tribe. In the meantime, they had struck out offshoots through Greece, and the name Hellas had, as will be seen[399], probably come, even in the time of Homer, to be applied in a secondary and comprehensive sense to the whole northern and central parts of it.
It is remarkable and undeniable, with reference both to Pelasgic and to Hellenic times, that in whatever part of the country ruling tribes or families might first make their appearance, the permanent seat of power for Greece was uniformly in the Peloponnesus. Every movement of political importance appears to direct itself thither, and there to rest in equilibrium. The old tradition of Pelasgus, the dynasties of Danaids, Perseids, and Pelopids, the great Heraclid and Doric invasion, evidently aiming at laying hold on the centre of dominion, and yet more, that Spartan primacy (ἡγεμονία), which endured for so many centuries, all tell the same tale; finally the train of evidence is crowned by the strong local sympathies of Juno. It was only in the fifth century before the Christian era that Athens acquired the lead: nor did she keep it long. Her sway, after an interval, was followed by another shortlived ascendancy, that of Thebes, in the fourth century. But Greece ended as she had begun: and the last splendours of her national sentiment and military courage were flung from its pristine seats in Peloponnesus: from Lacedæmon, and Achaia. The old Amphictyonic Union alone remained, throughout the historic times of Greece, to bear witness to the fact that it was in the north of the Isthmus, and above all in Thessaly, that the Hellic tribes first organised themselves as distinct political integers, united in substance, if not in form, in respect of their common religious worship, and their common blood.
It was probably greater security, which gave this advantage, in early times, to Southern over Northern and Midland Greece. Only one narrow neck of land led into the Peloponnesus, and that passage was so circuitous, or dangerous, or both, that it was not the highway of immigrant tribes, who seem usually to have crossed the Corinthian gulf into Elis. This tract of land had not indeed the whole, but it had much, of the advantage enjoyed by England. It was not quite, but it was almost,
When reached, it was the highway to nothing. The fat lands of Bœotia were a road onwards for all who came from Thessaly: there was here a choice between barrenness and poverty, on the one hand, like those of Attica in early times, and insecurity of tenure in the rich soils, which were the object of desire to each tribe as it went upon its march. The Peloponnesus was richer than the one, far more secure than the other: it throve accordingly; and in the Trojan war this small territory supplied four hundred and thirty ships, probably including the greatest number of large vessels, while the other two divisions of continental Greece together gave no more than five hundred and thirty. And it seems to have had altogether a more vigorous and concentrated political organisation; for while the five hundred and thirty were in fifteen divisions, under twenty-six leaders, the Peloponnesian force was in six divisions, under nine leaders only, and of the six three at least, namely, those of Mycenæ, Lacedæmon, and Arcadia, were virtually under the direct command of Agamemnon.
Various derivations have been suggested for the name of the Pelasgi. Some will have it to come from Peleg, mentioned in the tenth chapter of Genesis, whose name, said to mean division, is taken to allude to the partition of the earth’s surface among the various tribes of the human race. Marsh well observes, that this amounts to no more than possibility: that the meaning of the word will not serve to attach it to the Pelasgi in particular, as in the early ages of the world migration, with partition and repartition, was a continuous process: and that, even if true, it tells us nothing of them antecedent to their European settlement[401]: nothing, that is to say, of a material kind, except what we know independently of it, viz. their being, in common with all other races, of eastern origin. Clinton gives other reasons for rejecting this etymology[402], while he sees force in the reference of the names of Iapetus and Ion to Japheth and Javan respectively. It seems plain that we could not safely build upon even a complete similarity of name, in a case where the interval of time that separates Peleg and Pelasgi, the terms we are to compare, is so vast and so obscure.
So also the name πελαργοὶ, meaning storks, has been taken to be the foundation of Πελασγοί; and the explanation has been given, that the stork is a migratory bird, and that the Pelasgi were called after it on account of their wanderings.
This explanation, which seems worse than the former, rests in part upon a statement of Herodotus misconstrued. He calls the Dorians ἔθνος πουλυπλάνητον κάρτα[403], and this has been erroneously applied to the Pelasgians, of whom, on the contrary, he says, οὐδαμῆ κω ἐξεχώρησε. This statement from a writer of the age of Herodotus, fully neutralises the statement of Dionysius, who describes them as itinerant, and never securely settled[404]. He may, indeed, mean no more than Thucydides means, when he says (i. 2), that the occupants of good soils were the most liable to dispossession. But does this idea of itinerancy correspond with the migrations of the stork, which seem to have reference to the steady periodical variations of climate, and to be as far as possible from the idea implied in ‘much-roving?’
It appears to have been the understood characteristic of that bird, to draw to and dwell about the settled habitations of men. It seems highly improbable, and without precedent, that a widely spread nation should take its name from a bird: but may not the bird have taken its name from the nation? If it were a nation emphatically of settlers, as opposed to pirates, robbers, nomads, and rovers of all kinds, dwelling with comfort in fixed abodes, as opposed to the ἀνιπτόποδες χαμαίευναι[405], might not birds, which seemed to share these settlements, be reasonably named after the people?
It by no means appears as if Aristophanes, in the passage where he uses the term, intended a mere pun. It is in the comedy of the Birds[406], and is an allusion to that law of the Athenians, evidently here signified under the name of storks, which required children to provide for their parents[407]. The passage is clearly a testimony to the Pelasgic origin of the Athenians: and it may be based upon the belief, that the storks took their name from the Pelasgi, and that the similarity lay in their habit of settling on the roofs of houses and the like, almost as if inhabitants, in the villages of which the Pelasgi were the first Greek founders. It also gives room for the conjecture that Πελαργοὶ may have been the old form of the name. The stork, it may be remembered, was one of the sacred birds of the Egyptians.
Again, the word πέλαγος has been suggested as supplying the true derivation of the Pelasgian name. Marsh[408] rejects it, because he conceives it is founded upon the hypothesis that the Pelasgi came across the Ægean, which he thinks improbable. But the evidence appears to be in favour of their having come principally by the islands, if not at once across the Ægean. It may also be questioned, whether the etymology must rest on this hypothesis exclusively. For, in the first place, the more natural construction would be, not that they came by sea, but that they came from beyond sea, an idea which might very well attach to any people of Asiatic origin. So it was that the too famous Pelagius, who is known to have been a Welshman, came by his classical name; a name bearing that very signification[409]. But is it not also possible, that πέλαγος may at one time have had the meaning of a plain? It properly signifies a wide open level surface, corresponding with the Latin æquor, and with our main. Hence Homer never attaches to the word πέλαγος any of his usual epithets for the sea, such as οἴνοψ, ἠχηεὶς, μεγακήτης, ἀτρύγετος, πολύφλοισβος; but only μέγα, great: and he uses the phrase ἅλος ἐν πελάγεσσι[410], which would be mere tautology, if πέλαγος properly and directly meant the sea. So Pindar has πόντιον πέλαγος, Æschylus ἃλς πελαγία, and Apollonius Rhodius πέλαγος θαλάσσης[411]. There were in Macedonia, as we learn from Strabo, a people called Pelagones[412], and in Homer we find the names Πελάγων and Πηλέγων. Again, we have in Hesychius, among the meanings of πελαγίζειν, ψεύδεσθαι μεγάλα, and for πέλαγος he gives μέγεθος, πλῆθος, βύθος; as well as πλάτος θαλάσσης. It seems not impossible that the Pelasgi may owe their name to the word πέλαγος, in its primary sense of plain and open surface: as the word Θρῇξ, in this view its exact counterpart, was derived from τρῆχυς, and at one time meant simply the inhabitant of a rough and rocky place, a mountaineer or highlander.
There is, however, another mode in which Πελασγοὶ may bear the sense of inhabitants of the plain, or rather (for it is in this that the word will most comprehensively apply to them, and most closely keep to its proper meaning), of the cultivable country, which would include valleys as well as plains properly so called: and indeed this derivation, suggested by K. O. Müller, is the simplest possible, if only we can clear the first step, which assumes the identity of Πελασγοὶ and Πελαργοί. He says it is compounded of πέλω and ἄργος. The first meaning of πέλω seems to imply motion with repetition or custom. Afterwards it is to be, and especially to be wont to be. Thus it will, while yet very near its fountain, have the sense, to frequent or inhabit. To the same origin he refers πόλις, πολέω; and also the πελώρια, the harvest feast of Thessaly, taken as the feast of inhabitation[413] or settlement.
The subject of this name will again come into view, when the later name of Ἀργεῖοι is examined. In the mean time, let it be observed, that if the Pelasgi were thus called from being, or if only they in fact were, inhabitants of the plains, we find in this some further explanation of the tradition, which can hardly have been an unmixed error, of their vagrant character. For the plains contained the most fertile soils: and, especially as they were of limited extent, their inhabitants could not but rapidly increase, so as to require more space for the support of their population. Further, these rich tracts offered a prize to all the tribes who were in want of settlements; according to the just observation of Thucydides[414], already quoted, that the most fertile parts of Greece, namely, Bœotia, Thessaly, and much of Peloponnesus, most frequently changed hands. This would be more and more applicable to a given people, in proportion as it might be more addicted to peaceful pursuits. Manifestly, it is as inhabitants of the plains, or the cultivable country, that Homer especially marks the Pelasgi: both by calling the great plain of Thessaly Pelasgic, and by the epithet ἐριβώλαξ which he applies (Il. ii. 841, and xvii. 301), to their Larissa, on the only two occasions when he mentions it. And the etymological inquiry seems, upon the whole, to direct us, although the particular path be somewhat uncertain, towards a similar conclusion.