name to include all the inhabitants of ancient Greece, of whatever race; with much the same vagueness as we now say Britons and British of all the inhabitants of our islands. If all our history were lost, an interminable controversy might be propagated n distant times on the relation of the English to the British, if learned men neglected to observe how national names, which at first are very limited in application,—as Pelasgian, Italian, Teuton, Alleman, Frank, Briton,—tend to grow into a generic and comprehensive use. In fact, we know positively that a great change took place in the meaning of the name Pelasgian, between the periods of Homer and Æschylus. In the poems of Homer we read of Argos in Thessaly, as distinctively Pelasgian; in contrast to which Homer calls Argos in Peloponnesus Achæan. But Æschylus and the poets who follow him conceived of Peloponnesian Argos as emphatically the metropolis of the Pelasgian nation, the dwelling-place of "Pelasgus" himself[1]. In the same spirit Herodotus identifies all the oldest fixed population of Greece with Pelasgians, though Homer always uses Pelasgian
- ↑ Possibly we can even trace this opinion to a misinterpretation of the Cyclopian buildings of Mycenæ. Since the citadel of Athens was fortified by a people called Pelasgians, the treasury of Atreus was referred to the same people; whence may have arisen the precipitate inference, that the oldest inhabitants of Argos were Pelasgians. Mr. Kenrick (Philol. Mus. vol. i. p. 626) has treated Herodotus's "testimony" to the Pelasgianism of all Greece, as utterly worthless. To this I understand Grote also to accede; vol. ii. p. 347.
