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Even the names in the despatches seem like a voice from antiquity; Macedonia, where the Turkish forces are gathering; and Larissa, where Prince Constantine is intrenched. Larissa is a name older than Rome, older than the Olympic games, or even than Homer. It is the Pelasgian name for a fortified city!
The irrational opinion that the Roman nation was a mongrel people finds its support in that division, and its advocates have striven by various means to represent the three great Italian races as elements entering into the composition of the primitive Rome, and to transform a people which has exhibited in language, polity, and religion, a pure and national development such as few have equalled, into a confused aggregate of Etruscan and Sabine, Hellenic and, forsooth! even Pelasgian fragments.
All Latin words which resemble the Greek are Pelasgian, and all which do not are Etruscan, Oscan, or Umbrian.
Apidanean Arcadians alone existed, Arcadians who lived even before the moon, it is said, eating acorns on the hills; nor at that time was the Pelasgian land ruled by the glorious sons of Deucalion, in the days when Egypt, mother of men of an older time, was called the fertile Morning-land, and the river fair-flowing Triton, by which all the Morning-land is watered; and never does the rain from Zeus moisten the earth; but from the flooding of the river abundant crops spring up.
At this moment Hippothous brave son of the Pelasgian Lethus, in his zeal for Hector and the Trojans, was dragging the body off by the foot through the press of the fight, having bound a strap round the sinews near the ancle; but a mischief soon befell him from which none of those could save him who would have gladly done so, for the son of Telamon sprang forward and smote him on his bronze-cheeked helmet.
I give the name of Pelasgian to the group scattered along the north shores of the Mediterranean, the Greek and Latin, including the modifications of the latter under the names of Italian, Spanish, &c.
The old notion, that the heroes were deified men, is no longer tenable. With but few exceptions, we can trace their names as the names of the old gods of the Hellenic or Pelasgian races; and if they appeared later in human forms, they descended from Olympus to assume them. Diomed was the OEtolian sun-god; Achilles was worshipped in Thessaly long before he became the hero of the tale of Troy.
Ridgeway's theory, a northern people "Celts" who conquered with iron weapons a Pelasgian bronze-using Mycenaean people, it is not credible to me that Achaean or Pelasgian poets habitually used the traditional Pelasgian term for the metal of weapons, namely, bronze, in songs chanted before victors who had won their triumph with iron.
The other States of the Peloponnesus, have also their genealogical legends, which trace their ancestors to gods and goddesses, which I omit, and turn to those which belong to Attica. After a long interval, Cecrops, half man and half serpent, became king of the country. By some he is represented as a Pelasgian, by others, as an Egyptian.
That was the height of the temple of the Greeks, which was only the enlarged form of the hut or the house of their Pelasgian ancestors. It was built low in due reverence to its origin and to their gods. No other architecture has ever surpassed its beauty and sublimity. The earth is ours to build upon and over, nor much above.
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