Note 420 — Chapter II · THE HELLENIC PEOPLE GENERALLY, IN THE EARLY HISTORICAL TIMES.

Larcher, Chronologie d’Hérodote, ch. viii. pp. 215, 274; Raoul Rochette, Histoire des Colonies Grecques, book i. ch. 5; Niebuhr, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. pp. 26-64, 2d ed. (the section entitled Die Oenotrer und Pelasger); O. Müller, Die Etrusker, vol. i. (Einleitung, ch. ii. pp. 75-100); Dr. Thirlwall, History of Greece, vol. i. ch. ii. pp. 36-64. The dissentient opinions of Kruse and Mannert may be found in Kruse, Hellas, vol. i. pp. 398-425; Mannert, Geographie der Griechen und Römer, part viii. Introduct. p. 4, seqq.

Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing up their cumulative effect, asserts (“not as an hypothesis, but with full historical conviction,” p. 54) “that 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 Rhyndakus,” (near Kyzikus,) with only an interruption in Thrace. What is perhaps the most remarkable of all, is the contrast between his feeling of disgust, despair, and aversion to the subject, when he begins the inquiry (“the name Pelasgi,” he says, “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,” p. 28), and the full confidence and satisfaction with which he concludes it.