PELASGIANS. Various traditions were current among the Greeks with regard to the pre-Greek inhabitants of their country. They were inclined to call all these by the general name of Pelas gians, although they recognized Carians and Leleges as distinct. The Dorians claimed that the Ionians were Pelasgian or at least mainly so, and that they themselves were true Greeks. The in habitants of Attica, who were regarded as Ionian, boasted that they were autochthonous, the original inhabitants of the land.
In the Homeric poems Pelasgians appear as allies of Troy.
They appear to be settled in south-eastern Thrace close to the Hellespont in a district called Larissa (II., ii. 84o-843, x. Some suppose that the Larissa here mentioned is the town of that name in Thessaly, but the catalogue of ships, in which the passage occurs, appears to follow a definite geographical order. Larissa stands between the Hellespont and Thrace. The Iliad also refers to the district of Argos near Mt. Othrys in Thessaly as Pelasgic, and also uses the same epithet in a famous passage of the Zeus of Dodona (Il., ii. 681-684, xvi. 233-235). In the Odyssey Pelasgians appear in Crete (Od. xvii. 175-177). Hesiod refers to Dodona as "seat of Pelasgians," while Hecataeus refers to Pelasgus as king of Thessaly. To Aeschylus and Sophocles Argos in the Peloponnese is the Pelasgian land. Herodotus knows of actual Pelasgians at Placie and Scylace on the Asiatic coast of the Hellespont as well as near Creston on the Strymon. The islands of Lemnos and Imbros had also, he informs us, a Pelasgian population, conquered by Athens at the close of the 6th century. Apart from these actual instances of Pelasgians, both Herodotus and Thucydides appear to regard any survival from pre-Greek times as Pelasgic. A well-known example of this is the prehistoric wall of the Athenian acropolis, anciently regarded and still corn monly referred to as Pelasgian, and the epithet spread to all similar prehistoric masonry, especially that built of large blocks, in any part of Greece.
It has been held that the common Greek tradition arose from a misunderstanding, particularly perhaps by Hesiod and Heca taeus, of the two passages in the Iliad in which the Zeus of Dodona and the Thessalian Argos are referred to as Pelasgic. Where Homer used a general epithet meaning "remotely an cient," later writers have wrongly concluded that he referred specifically to actual Pelasgians as inhabitants of these places. If this is so, the problem is merely thrown farther back, for an explanation is needed of how the epithet Pelasgic had attained the general meaning of "ancient" by the time of the composition of the Homeric poems. To certain people at a certain period "Pelasgic" must have been a specific epithet. The Pelasgians must have been regarded either as very ancient people or as former inhabitants of the land. Much turns upon the meaning of the epithet Pelasgic as applied in the Iliad to the Zeus of Dodona. Zeus is the last one would expect to be referred to as Pelasgic, for of all the gods' names his is most certainly Greek.
The simplest explanation is perhaps that there existed at Dodona a very ancient pre-Greek or pre-Achaean shrine occupied by Greeks who attached to the deity the name of their own god Zeus.
All instances of actual Pelasgians from Homer to Herodotus point to their being a northern people. Thrace, Epirus and Thes saly are their homes. It is certain that there were pre-Achaean inhabitants of Greece. The simplest view now held is that Greek speaking peoples broke down into Greece from the north in three successive waves, Ionian, Achaean and Dorian, subduing a pre vious "Helladic" population and setting up, after the second in vasion (i.e., of Achaeans), the Mycenean civilization in the Peloponnese. If this is the simplest view, it does not solve all problems and it does not as yet rest upon a certain foundation of fact. An early stratum of population in Greece was in close touch with Anatolia. A large number of Greek place-names point to the conclusion that Greece was colonized from Anatolia. By whom we do not know, and we are also ignorant of what language these early people spoke. It is also possible that the Achaeans them selves were in Asia Minor before they were in Greece and that they brought thither the Anatolian place-names. It is no more than tradition that connects such early people with the Pelasgians.
The name Pelasgi which almost certainly stands for Pelak-skoi or Pelag-Skoi has been connected with riXayos, "the sea," and the people consequently regarded as sea-faring. The connection is not very convincing. It has also been related to the name of the semi-Illyrian Pelagones of Macedonia, and it is possible, though unproven, that the names do represent the same stem. Possibly the Pelasgians were no more than Vlachs, or Wallachian shepherds, who in classical as in modern times have been in the habit of wandering in large numbers down into Greece. The name is perhaps no more than Velak-ski. If this were so, it would ac count for their being dotted over various regions in Thrace and the north and also, if their habits were the same at the dawn of history as afterwards, of their being an ancient and integral part of Greek tradition and life. G. Sergi describes as "Pelasgian" one branch of the Mediterranean or Eur-African race.