(Πελάγιοι), 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 Pelasgus, father of Lycaon, King of Arcadia, and reputed ancestor of the race. (Strabo, vii., p. 321.) Some maintain, however, that the genuine form of the word was Πελαγρός, which is variously derived (1) from Ἀγρός, a plain, in old Greek, and ἀδάν; (2) from Ἀγρός, a field, and πέλας; and, finally, from πελαγός, 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. Schweigler, 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 (Rom. Greek.) 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 "Pelasgian Argos" in Thessaly. "That part of Thessaly," says Strabo, "is called Pelasgian Argos which extends from the coast between the outlet of the Peneus and Thermopylae 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 "Pelasgian king." Moving southward, we next find traces of the Pelasgi in Bocotia, 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 Peloponnese, and particularly of their intimate relation 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 (Hist. 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 Aegean Sea. Homer alludes to them in Crete (Odys. xix., 175); Herodotus in Samothrace (ii. 51); Herodotus (v. 25), 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, Syllace 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 (Βάρβαρος γλῶσσαι Ἑλλήνων). 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 Pelasgic 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 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 Pelasgic 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, Phoenician, 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 substantial language different from Greek; but whether differing from it in a greater or less degree (e.g., in the degree of Latin or of Phoenician), 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 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 able men, such as Niebuhr, or O. Müller, or Dr Thirlwall, 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) Enotrus, son of Lycaon, 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 Dondonian oracle. Becoming conciliated to the aborigines, the Pelasgi had a territory assigned them near Veii, 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 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 Hellenezed. 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 Otfrid Milde-Pelestrina respecting "this unknown and undiscoverable period." (Vol. i., p. 297.) Niebuhr's hypothesis is likewise assailed by Clinton in his Fasti Hellenici, 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 Hellanicus and Pherecydes or Myrtilus. 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 Rom. Geschichte.