Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/279

 PELASGIAN LANGUAGE. 268 w resolution to decline so insoluble a problem. No attested fucta are now present to us none were present to Herodotus and Thucydides, even in their age on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the ante-Hellenic Pelasgians. And where such is the case, we may without impropriety apply the remark of Herodotus, respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Kile by a supposed con- nection with the circumfluous Ocean, that "the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism." 1 As far as our knowledge extends, there were no towns or vil- lages called Pelasgian, in Greece proper, since 776 B. c. But there still existed in two different places, even in the age of Herodotus, people whom he believed to be Pelasgians. One portion of these occupied the towns of Plakia and Skylake near Kyzikus, on the Propontis ; another dwelt in a town called Kres- ton, near the Thermaic gulf. 2 There were, moreover, certain other Pelasgian townships which he does not specify, it seems, indeed, from Thucydides, that there were some little Pelasgian townships on the peninsula of Athos. 3 Now, Herodotus acquaints us with the remarkable fact, that the people of Kreston, those of Plakia and Skylake, and those of the other unnamed Pelasgian townships, all spoke the same language, and each of them re- spectively a different language from their neighbors around them. all Europe, were spread from the Po and the Arno to the Rhyndakus," (near Kyzikus,) with only an interruption in Thrace. What is perhaps the most remarkable of all, is the contrast between his feeling of disgust, despair, and aversion to the subject, when he begins the inquiry (" the name Pelasgi" ha says, "is odious to the historian, who hales the spurio'ts philology out ofwhick the pretences to knowledge on the subject of such extinct people arise" p. 28), and the full confidence and satisfaction with which he concludes it. 1 Herodot. ii. 23 : 'O 6s Trepl TOV 'Qnsuvov emac, cf a^avee TOV jii<-&oii avevsinac, OVK e%ei eAey^ov. 2 That Kreston is the proper reading in Herodotus, there seems every reason to believe not Kroton, as Dionys. Hal. represents it (Ant. Rom, i. 26) in spite of the authority of Niebuhr in favor of the latter. 3 Thucyd. iv. 109. Compare the new Fragmenta of Strabo, lib. vii. edited from the Vatican MS. by Kramer, and since by Tafel (Tubingen, 1844), 6ct 34, p. 26, ti/njaav 6i- rijv Xefrfiovijaov rcvTr/v rtiv in A.IJHVOV Tle^aa- yuv nvec, cfr irivre hr/fn'i/icvoi Atov, Qvaaov.