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On the continent of Greece, when the revolution became complete, the Pelasgi appear to have retained only Arcadia, the greater part of Thessaly , the land of Dodona, and Attica.
Their kings can be traced by tradition to a time long prior to the recorded genealogy of any other tribe, and Inachus, the father of the Pelasgian Phoroneus, is but another name for the remotest era to which Grecian chronology can ascend . Whether the Pelasgi were anciently a foreign or a Grecian tribe, has been a subject of constant and celebrated discussion.
The most interesting, if only as the most mysterious, race of ancient days, the Pelasgi, that overspread, in early times of Greece, the total Mediterranean, a race distinguished for beauty and for intellect, and sorrowful beyond all power of man to read the cause that could lie deep enough for so imperishable an impression, they were pariahs.
They therefore revive the theory of de Cara, which connects the Hyksos with the Hittites and these with the Pelasgi and Tyrseni. This is a very interesting theory, which, when carried out to its logical conclusion, would connect the Hyksos and Hittites racially with the pre-Hellenic "Minoan" Mycenseans of Greece, as well as with the Etruscans of Italy. But there is little of certainty in it.
I incline, on the contrary, to believe, with the more eminent of English scholars, that the language of the Pelasgi contained at least the elements of that which we acknowledge as the Greek; and from many arguments I select the following: 1st.
Even the dim traditions of the learned that bring the sons of Hellas from the vast and undetermined territories of Northern Thrace, to be the victors of the pastoral Pelasgi, and the founders of the line of demi-gods, might serve you to trace back their primeval settlements to the same region whence, in later times, the Norman warriors broke on the dull and savage hordes of the Celt, and became the Greeks of the Christian world.
I remembered at that moment a correspondence I had had years before with Virchow, on the Pelasgi, and their probable relation with the Albanians, whom he regarded as the descendants of the Pelasgi; and, thinking of his collection of skulls, I asked the captain if he knew the spot where the body of the Albanian lay, and if the bones were still there, and when he assured me that they were where he fell, I offered him two florins to bring me the skull, which he did.
The received account of the agricultural skill of the Pelasgi is tolerably well supported. Dionysius tells us that the Aboriginals having assigned to those Pelasgi, whom the oracle sent from Dodona into Italy, the marshy and unprofitable land called Velia, they soon drained the fen: their love of husbandry contributed, no doubt, to form the peculiar character of their civilization and religion.
What common sense thus suggests to us, our researches confirm, and we find accordingly that the Earth and the Heaven are the earliest deities of the agricultural Pelasgi. As the Nile to the fields of the Egyptian earth and heaven to the culture of the Greek.
The perturbed restlessness and constant migration of tribes in Greece, recorded both by tradition and by history, would consequently tend at a very remote period to the institution and diffusion of slavery and the Pelasgi of one tribe would become the masters of the Pelasgi of another.
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