The Historians' History of the World 03

There are also other cases in pre-Homeric times of mythical people having been transposed from heaven to earth—thus the Danaans of whom we have already spoken; furthermore, the Lapithæ, who are said to have lived in the northern part of Thessaly at the foot of Olympus and Ossa. Their close association with the centaurs leaves no doubt that they, like the latter, belong to the realm of mythology. Closely related to them are the Phlegyæ. The Iliad gives us a picture of Ares, as he advances to battle in their ranks, but leaves their dwelling-place indefinite; later authorities placed it in Thessaly or in the valley of the Bœotian Cephisus. Coronis, the mother of Æsculapius, belonged to this tribe; also Ixion, who laid violent hands on Hera. Finally, the Phlegyæ are said to have burned the Delphic temple and in punishment therefor were destroyed by Apollo by lightning and an earthquake. The Minyæ also belong to this circle. They compose the crew of the ship Argo, which goes into the distant sun-land of the east to bring back from thence the Golden Fleece; the daughter of their tribal hero, Minyas, is Persephone, and no further proof is necessary to show that he himself is a god and his people mythical. Afterwards when the starting-point of the Argonauts was localised in the Pagasæan Gulf, the Minyæ also became a Thessalian race; from there, like their relatives the Phlegyæ, they were brought over to Bœotia, where Orchomenos in Homer is called “Minyean.” And since the Iliad furthermore mentions a river Minyos in the later Triphylia, the Minyæ were placed there also.

The Pelasgians play a much more important part in the conventional primitive history of Greece than the last-mentioned peoples. Throughout antiquity their name is connected with the western part of the great Thessalian plain, the “Pelasgic Argos” of Homer, the Pelasgiotis of historic times. The Iliad speaks of the Pelasgians, famed for their spears, who lived far from Troy in broad-furrowed Larissa, and probably intends thereby the Thessalian capital. Thessalian Achilles prays to the Pelasgian Zeus of Dodona before the departure of his friend Patroclus. But the Iliad as yet knows nothing of Pelasgian inhabitants of Dodona; on the contrary the catalogue of ships reckons this sacred city as belonging to the territory of the Ænianes and Perrhæbi, and it is Hesiod who first makes the temple to have been founded by Pelasgians. Elsewhere Pelasgians are mentioned by Homer only in Crete.

Otherwise the later accounts. Wherever within the circle of the Ægean Sea the name of Larissa occurs, there Pelasgians are said to have lived—in the Peloponnesian Argos, in Æolis of Asia Minor, on the island of Lesbos, on the Cayster near Ephesus. It is possibly for this reason that the Odyssey places Pelasgians in Crete, since there, also, there was a Larissæan field near Hierapytna, and Gortyn is said to have been called Larissa in ancient times. From Argos the Pelasgians also became woven into the myths of the neighbouring Arcadia, the ancestral hero of which, Lycaon, is called by Hesiod a son of Pelasgus.

Pelasgians were said to have lived once in Attica also. The wall which defended the approach to the citadel of Athens bore the name Pelargicon, and as no one knew what that meant, it was said that it had been corrupted out of Pelasgicon and that the citadel had been built by Pelasgians. These Pelasgians were then said to have been driven out by the Athenians and to have migrated to Lemnos. Why they went precisely to this place we do not know, nor why these Lemnian Pelasgians were called Tyrrhenians. Homer places the Sinties, that is a Thracian tribe, in Lemnos. Remnants of the original inhabitants of the island, who were driven out by the Athenians in about the year 500 B.C., were, a hundred years later, still living on the peninsula of Athos and on the Propontis near Placia and Scylace; they had preserved their old language, which was different from the Greek.

In consequence of this and similar traditions, the theory was brought forward in the sixth century that the Hellenes had been preceded in Greece by a Pelasgic race. Since, however, some of the Grecian tribes, as the Arcadians and Athenians, considered themselves to be autochthonous, there was nothing for it but to call the Pelasgians the ancestors of the later Hellenes, and so the whole change was reduced to one of name only. This to be sure was in contradiction of the statements of Homer, who names the Pelasgians among the allies of Troy, and hence evidently considered them to be racially antagonistic to the Greeks. The genealogists and historians of antiquity never got around this contradiction, which was indeed inexplicable with the means at their command.