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Updated: June 8, 2025
The most ancient languages of the Indo-European stock may be grouped in two distinct family pairs: the Aryan, which comprises two leading families, the Indian and Iranian, and the Graeco-Italic or Pelasgic, which comprises the Greek family and its various dialects, and the Italic family, the chief-subdivisions of which are the Etruscan, the Latin, and the modern languages derived from the Latin.
He turned his gaze from the city and the ocean; before him lay the vineyards and meadows of the rich Campania. The gate and walls ancient, half Pelasgic of the city, seemed not to bound its extent. Villas and villages stretched on every side up the ascent of Vesuvius, not nearly then so steep or so lofty as at present.
It is well known, that the languages of the Indian, Pelasgic, and German branch, belong to the first division; the American idioms, the Coptic or ancient Egyptian, and to a certain degree, the Semitic languages and the Biscayan, to the second.
This will account for the marked and marvellous difference between the martial and aristocratic strain of Homer and the peaceful and rustic verse of Hesiod , as well as for the distinction no less visible between the stirring mythology of the one and the thoughtful theogony of the other. And Hesiod is to Homer what the Pelasgic genius was to the Hellenic.
Of the Pelasgic and Etruscan town not a vestige remains; but the ruined foundations of Roman villas are still to be seen along the shore.
The ancient name of this marble was Marmor Molossium, from a region in Epirus now Albania which was a Roman province in the time of Pompey. It is associated with the celebrated campaigns in Italy of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, in which Greece was for the first time brought into contact with Rome. The region in which the quarries existed was the most ancient seat of Pelasgic religion.
Passing over the Mount Parthenius, amid whose wild recesses gloomed the antique grove dedicated to Telephus, the son of Hercules , the Athenian heard a voice call to him aloud, and started to behold that mystic god to whom, above the rest of earth, were dedicated the hills and woods of Arcady the Pelasgic Pan.
A rude tribe, according to all authority, of the vast and varied Pelasgic family, but essentially foreign to, and never amalgamated with, the indigenous Pelasgians of the Athenian soil, had in very remote times obtained a settlement in Attica. They had assisted the Athenians in the wall of their citadel, which confirmed, by its characteristic masonry, the general tradition of their Pelasgic race.
The Pelasgic architecture is often confounded with the Cyclopean. The Pelasgic masonry is polygonal, each stone fitting into the other without cement; that called the Cyclopean, and described by Pausanias, is utterly different, being composed by immense blocks of stone, with small pebbles inserted in the interstices.
Yet the positive institutions of the kings had blended themselves with the public and private manners of the city, some fragments of that venerable jurisprudence were compiled by the diligence of antiquarians, and above twenty texts still speak the rudeness of the Pelasgic idiom of the Latins.
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