PELAGIUS, the founder of the sect of the Pelagians, is supposed to have been a native of Britain, and first appears on the stage of history as a monk, residing at Rome, about the beginning of the fifth century. He was at that time a man of great moral earnestness. His adherence to the monkish rules was rigid, his efforts to reform both clergy and laity assiduous, and his sanctity well spoken of in all the churches. Yet it was this same deep regard for morality which was the occasion of Pelagius's lapse into error. Looking down from the height of his own self-righteousness, he was scandalized to see the majority of professing Christians grovelling carelessly and contentedly in every kind of sensuality. With all the intensity of his reforming zeal, he set himself to discover the cause and remedy of this moral disease. The cause, it occurred to him, was the trust which was placed throughout the church in the efficacy of the sacraments, and the sufficiency of faith. The remedy, he thought, would be a creed which should hold man's salvation to be dependent upon his own exertions. To develop such a creed into a regular and consistent form became his next endeavour. As the foundation of his system, he assumed that a just God could not visit the iniquities of one man upon the heads of others. On this was established the dogma, that the effects of Adam's first sin were confined to himself, and did not descend to his posterity. Accordingly death, and the other evils of life, were not the signs of a blighted spirit, but the necessary incidents of a body made of dust. Men therefore came into the world pure and innocent. Baptism, though needful to admit them into the kingdom of heaven, was not needful to cleanse them from moral pollution, or to insure their eternal blessedness. Nor was inward grace necessary to predispose them to love and obey the commandments of God. All the grace that they required was the privilege of exercising their natural faculties, of using the advantages of the gospel and the church, and of receiving forgiveness for any sins they might commit. With these aids alone they could confidently address themselves to the observance of the law. Their own free-will was able to choose the good, and their own strength was able to accomplish it. If they should step aside from the right path through ignorance or forgetfulness, they would not be culpable. Even if they should really become corrupt, they could convert themselves by their own exertions. Thus was a man's own righteousness, and not his faith, declared to be the means of his salvation.
This flagrant heresy being propagated in Palestine by Pelagius himself, and in Africa by his friend and disciple Cælestius, soon provoked opposition. Cælestius was excluded from the fellowship of the church by a synod held at Carthage in 412. Pelagius was arraigned before two ecclesiastical councils, held respectively at Jerusalem and Diospolis in 415. Although at both of these tribunals he succeeded in baffling his accusers, and deceiving his judges with sophistry and equivocation, yet he could not altogether nullify the suspicions of the orthodox. The North African bishops, led on by Augustine, commenced a deadly attack with books, letters, and edicts. In 417 they induced Pope Innocent I. to anathematize the rising heresy; in 418 they issued a formal edict against it from an assembly held at Carthage; and not long afterwards they prevailed upon the emperor to promulgate several decrees threatening the new sect with confiscation and banishment. The result was, that Pope Zosimus was forced to condemn the obnoxious doctrine; several ecclesiastical councils throughout Europe approved the sentence; Pelagius retired into exile, and went off the arena of history; and Pelagianism was nipt
in the bud, and was deprived of all existence as a formal confession of faith.
Of the numerous works of Pelagius, the following alone have been authenticated:—Expositionum in Epistolas Pauli Libri XIV.; Epistola ad Demetriadem, and Libellus Fidei ad Innocentium Papam. They are all included in the best editions of Jerome. (For an account of Pelagius and Pelagianism, see Augustine's De Gestis Pelagii; G. J. Vossius' Historia Controversiarum Pelagianarum; the Church Histories of Neander, Milner, Gieseler, and Waddington; Hagenbach's History of Doctrines; Patouillet's Vie de Pélagie, 1751; N. N. Leutzen's Dissertatio de Pelagianorum Doctrina Principis, Colon. Agr., 1833; and Wiggers' Pragmatische Darstellung des Augustinismus und Pelagianismus, 2 vols., Hamb. 1833. This last work has been translated into English by Professor Emerson, Svo, New York, 1840.)
PELAGIUS I., POPE, succeeded Virgilius in the Roman see in 555, and died in 560.
PELAGIUS II., POPE, succeeded Benedict I. in 578, and died in 590.
PELASGI (Πελασγοί), an ancient race, believed to have been widely spread over Greece and Italy in pre-historic times, but of whom scarcely anything definite is known. The name Pelasgi owes its derivation, according to tradition, to Pelagus, father of Lycæon, King of Arcadia, and reputed ancestor of the race. (Strabo, vii., p. 321.) Some maintain, however, that the genuine form of the word was Πελαργός, which is variously derived (1.) from Ἀργός, a plain, in old Greek, and πλάω; (2.) from Ἀργός, a field, and πλάω; and, finally, from πελαργός, storks, in allusion (3.) either to their wandering life, or (4.) to their rudeness of speech. Krase (Hellas) favours the first derivation, O. Müller (Die Etrusker) the second, Strabo and Myrsilus the third, and a writer in the Philological Museum, vol. i. ("On the names of the Antehellenic Inhabitants of Greece"), the fourth. Schwegler, the most recent writer who has ably taken up the entire question, is in considerable doubt whether the name Pelasgi is to be regarded as an ethnographic distinction, or as an epithet equivalent to autochthones, or aborigines (Röm. Gesch.) Nor is the origin of the Pelasgians better ascertained than their name. They are generally supposed to have immigrated from somewhere beyond sea, most probably from Asia Minor, by the Propontis and the Hellespont. The whole of Greece during the ante-Hellenic period was occupied by a number of barbarous tribes, of whom the most important were the Pelasgi, both as occupying a larger portion of the country than any other tribe, and from their wide diffusion into other territories. The whole of Hellas during this pre-historic age is said to have been more or less overrun by the Pelasgi. (Strabo, v., p. 220; Herodotus, ii. 56; viii. 44; Thucydides, i. 3.) The earliest notice of them, however (Homer, Iliad, ii. 681), represents them as having their chief abode in "Pelagian Argos" in Thessaly. "That part of Thessaly," says Strabo, "is called Pelagian Argos which extends from the coast between the outlet of the Peneus and Thermopylæ as far as the range of Pindus, because the Pelasgians were masters of that region." Epirus also, and especially Dodona, is made a chief abode of the Pelasgi by Homer, Hesiod, and Æschylus; the former informing us that Zeus was worshipped as the "Pelagian king." Moving southward, we next find traces of the Pelasgi in Boeotia, and especially in Attica, where, according to Herodotus (vi. 137), Thucydides (ii. 17), and Strabo (ix., p. 401), they took up their abode at Athens, under Mount Hymettus, from which they were, however, afterwards expelled. Apart from the legend already referred to of the Arcadian origin of the Pelasgi, we find frequent mention, especially in Herodotus, Æschylus, and Strabo, of their presence in the Peloponnesus, and particularly of their intimate rela-
tion to Argolis. Two conflicting centres of emanation are thus assigned to this race,—that of Thessaly and Epirus, and that of Arcadia; but there are no satisfactory means of determining whether the one account or the other be correct. Another curious contradiction with respect to this race is noticed by Wachsmuth (Hell. Alt., vol. i., part i.) Herodotus represents them as fixed and stationary (i. 56); while Strabo describes them as a moveable and migratory people (xiii. 3, § 3). Passing from the mainland of Greece we find marks of the presence of the Pelasgi in numerous islands of the Ægean Sea. Homer alludes to them in Crete (Odys. xix. 175); Herodotus in Samothrace (ii. 51); Herodotus (v. 26), Strabo (v., p. 220), Thucydides (iv. 109), and Pausanias (vii. 2), in Lemnos and Imbros; Dionysius (i. 18) traces them to Lesbos; Herodotus (vii. 95) says that seventeen of the Ionian Islands were inhabited by Pelasgi; and Menecrates (Strabo, xiii., p. 621) assigned to them not only the islands of Ionia, but also the coast of Asia Minor. The latter portion of his statement is likewise confirmed by Homer, Herodotus, Strabo, and Dionysius. Herodotus (i. 57) found, in his own time, two Pelasgian cities, Scylace and Placia, on the Hellespont, and a place called Creston, probably in Macedonia, speaking similar dialects, differing from their neighbours around them, but not ordinary Greek (βάρβαρον γλώσσαν ἰόντες). The historian quotes this fact in order to prove that the ancient language of the Pelasgi was a barbarous language, or distinct from that of the Hellenes. This passage in Herodotus has been the source of not a little controversy. Bishop Thirlwall is of opinion that the statement of Herodotus respecting the "barbarous" language of these Pelasgian communities simply means that they spoke a very bad Greek. "Nothing more," he says, "can be safely inferred from it, than that the Pelasgian language which Herodotus heard on the Hellespont and elsewhere sounded to him a strange jargon, as did the dialect of Ephesus to a Milesian, and as the Bolognese does to a Florentine." (Hist. of Greece, vol. i., c. ii., p. 60.) Mr Grote, on the other hand, asserts that the meaning of Herodotus is unmistakable as to the substantial difference of the Pelasgian language and the ordinary Greek. "The affirmation," he says, "of Herodotus is distinct and twice repeated, that the Pelasgians of these towns, and of his own time, spoke a barbaric language; and that word appears to me to admit but of one interpretation. To suppose that a man who, like Herodotus, had heard almost every variety of Greek in the course of his long travels, as well as Egyptian, Phœnician, Assyrian, Lydian, and other languages, did not know how to distinguish bad Hellenic from non-Hellenic, is in my judgment inadmissible." "I think it therefore certain," he again remarks, "that Herodotus pronounces the Pelasgians of his day to speak a substantive language different from Greek; but whether differing from it in a greater or less degree (e.g., in the degree of Latin or of Phœnician), we have no means of deciding." (Hist. of Greece, vol. ii., pp. 351–353.) Mr Ellis, in an ingenious pamphlet (Contributions to the Ethnography of Italy and Greece, by Robert Ellis, B.D., London, 1858), adopts a similar interpretation of the Greek historian. He says at p. 5, "In describing, then, the Pelasgian language as barbarous, Herodotus gives us to understand to what language—namely, the Greek—he considered the Pelasgian to be substantially foreign." Grote simplifies the vexed Pelasgian question, by not presuming "to determine anything in regard to the legendary Pelasgians and Leleges, the supposed ante-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece." "Whoever has examined," he says again, "the many conflicting systems respecting the Pelasgi, from the literal belief of Clavier, Larcher, and Raoul Rochette (which appears to me at least the most consistent way of proceeding), to the interpretative and half-incredulous processes applied by abler men, such as Niebuhr, or O. Müller, or Dr Thirlwall,
Pelasgi. will not be displeased with my resolution to decline so insoluble a problem." (Vol. ii., pp. 347, 351.) In the opinion of the Rev. George Rawlinson (History of Herodotus, London, 1858, vol. i., p. 665), the statement of Mr Grote regarding the radical difference of the Greek and Pelasgic languages "is one of undue and needless scepticism." Anglo-Saxon is a barbarian or foreign tongue to a modern Englishman, and so is Gothic to a modern German, Provençal to a Frenchman, Syriac to a Chaldee or Mosul. The diversity between the Hellenic and the Pelasgic was probably of this nature, as Niebuhr, Thirlwall, and C. O. Müller suppose. The nations were essentially of the same stock; the Hellenes having emerged from among the Pelasgi; and we may confidently pronounce on the Indo-European character of the latter from the fact, that the language of the former belongs to this family.
Traditions of the presence of the Pelasgi are not, however, limited to Greece; they are intimately connected likewise with the Italian peninsula. The fullest account of the primitive population of Central Italy is given by Dionysius. This writer represents (i. 11) Gnotrus, son of Lycion, leading a colony into Italy seventeen generations before the Trojan war. He further informs us that Pelasgians came from Thessaly by sea, and landed in Italy at the mouth of the Po. Thence they moved southwards, taking some cities from the Umbrians, and were only withheld from attacking the aborigines by a response given to the Pelasgi by the Dononian oracle. Becoming conciliated to the aborigines, the Pelasgi had a territory assigned them near Velia, and they subsequently aided their benefactors in expelling the Siceli or Siculi into the island Sicily, to which they gave their name. After a time, the historian continues, the Pelasgians returned to Greece in separate bodies, and from the name Tyrrhenia by which the western coast of Italy was known to the Greeks this race acquired the appellation of Tyrrhenian, and were designated Tyrrhenian Pelasgians. "These testimonies in Dionysius," says Clinton (Fasti Hellenici, vol. i., p. 28), "establish the fact that Pelasgi from Greece emigrated to Italy; but the circumstances and the time of that earliest migration are lost in remote antiquity." On this observation Sir G. C. Lewis comments by affirming, "The fact itself seems as uncertain as the circumstances and the time. Mr Clinton does not advert to the statement of Dionysius respecting a migration of Pelasgians back to Italy, which is an essential part of his narrative." (On the Credibility of Early Roman History, vol. i., p. 282, note.) Lewis further remarks that "this portion of the narrative of Dionysius is merely an ethnological legend. No authentic record of the migrations or acts of the Pelasgian people appears to have been accessible to the historians of antiquity." (Vol. i., p. 282.) Other testimonies besides that of Dionysius go to confirm the tradition of the immigration of the Pelasgians into Latium, and even assert the name of Rome itself to be Pelasgian. (See Lewis, vol. i., p. 395.) Indeed the whole of Italy, according to legendary record, was inhabited in ancient times by the Pelasgi. Founding on these genealogical and mythical traditions, Niebuhr has come to the conclusion, "not as an hypothesis, but with full historical conviction," that the Pelasgians were the primitive population both of Greece and of Italy. He says, "There was a time when the Pelasgians, perhaps the most extended people in all Europe, were spread from the Po and the Arno to the Bosphorus." (Hist. of Rome, vol. i., p. 25.) This race, he maintains, gradually disappeared because they became Hellenized. The Greek element in the Latin language he holds to be Pelasgic. Schwegler, who agrees in the main with Grote respecting the unauthentic character of the Pelasgic traditions, condemns the hypothesis of Niebuhr as entirely untenable. Lewis likewise maintains that the alleged records of the Pelasgians rest on no historical basis, and he
rejects the conclusions both of Niebuhr and Otfried Müller respecting "this unknown and undiscoverable period." (Vol. i., p. 297.) Niebuhr's hypothesis is likewise assailed by Clinton in his Fast. Hell., vol. i., p. 97. The grounds of Schwegler's condemnation, which is the most thoroughgoing, is as follows:—1. The absence of any indigenous name for the Pelasgians in Italy. 2. The evident traces of Roman writers on the subject having obtained their information from the Greek logographers. 3. The contradictory accounts given by different writers of the migrations of the Pelasgians, according as they follow Hellenicus and Pherecydes or Myrsilus. 4. The absence of any historical monument of the Pelasgi in Italy, whether literary or of another kind. If unsound in his hypothesis, Niebuhr was not far wrong when he wrote the following sentence regarding this tangled question:—"The name Pelasgi is odious to the historian who hates the spurious philology out of which the pretences to knowledge on the subject of such extinct people arise." (Hist. of Rome, vol. i.)
In addition to the works already cited, the reader may consult Kruse's Hellas, vol. ii., for a copious collection of passages bearing on the Pelasgi; also the criticisms of that work by Thirlwall in the Philological Museum, vol. i., p. 305, and Clinton in the Fasti Hellenici, vol. i.; also Mommsen's Röm. Geschichte.