Pelasgian Sentence Examples

The Illyrians were also "Pelasgian," but in a wider sense.

The name Larissa was common to many "Pelasgian" towns, and apparently signified a fortified city or burg, such as the citadel of Argos.

The Minyae were expelled by a Pelasgian tribe who came from Attica.

Alcaeus (7th-6th centuries B.C.) calls Antandrus in the Troad Lelegian, but Herodotus (5th century) substitutes Pelasgian (q.v.).

According to Weizsacker, he was an old Pelasgian or pre-Hellenic god, to whom human sacrifice was offered, bearing a non-Hellenic name similar to XLKo, whence the story originated of his metamorphosis into a wolf.

Ancient writers tell us that its original Pelasgian name was Agylla, and that the Etruscans took it and called it Caere (when this occurred is not known), I A limestone well adapted for building.

It looks therefore as if "Pelasgian" were here used connotatively, to mean either "formerly occupied by Pelasgian" or simply "of immemorial age."

For Aeschylus (Supplices 1, sqq.) Pelasgus is earthborn, as in Asius, and rules a kingdom stretching from Argos to Dodona and the Strymon; but in Prometheus 879, the "Pelasgian" land simply means Argos.

He alludes to other districts where Pelasgian peoples lived on under changed names; Samothrace and Antandrus in Troas are probably instances of this.

In Lemnos and Imbros he describes a Pelasgian population who were only conquered by Athens shortly before soo B.C., and in this connexion he tells a story of earlier raids of these Pelasgians on Attica, and of a temporary settlement there of Hellespontine Pelasgians, all dating from a time "when the Athenians were first beginning to count as Greeks."

Elsewhere "Pelasgian" in Herodotus connotes anything typical of, or surviving from, the state of things in Greece before the coming of the Hellenes.

In this sense all Greece was once "Pelasgic"; the clearest instances of Pelasgian survival in ritual and customs and antiquities are in Arcadia, the "Ionian" districts of north-west Peloponnese, and Attica, which have suffered least from hellenization.

Ephorus, relying on Hesiodic tradition of an aboriginal Pelasgian type in Arcadia, elaborated a theory of the Pelasgians as a warrior-people spreading (like "Aryans") from a "Pelasgian home," and annexing and colonizing all the parts of Greece where earlier writers had found allusions to them, from Dodona to Crete and the Troad, and even as far as Italy, where again their settlements had been recognized as early as the time of Hellanicus, in close connexion once more with "Tyrrhenians."

The copious additional information given by later writers is all by way either of interpretation of local legends in the light of Ephorus's theory, or of explanation of the name "Pelasgoi"; as when Philochorus expands a popular etymology "stork-folk" (w€Xaa'yoi-- it €Xap'yoi) into a theory of their seasonal migrations; or Apollodorus says that Homer calls Zeus Pelasgian "because he is not far from every one of us," 6TL Tiffs ryes 7rEXas EaTCV.

The meaning of the term "Pelasgian" is, however, too obscure to furnish a basis for ethnographical speculation; in the time of Herodotus it may have already come to denote a period rather than a race.

Since the kinship of the latter with the members of adjacent non-Dorian states was admitted, two different explanations seem to have been made, (I) on behalf of the non-Dorian populations, either that the Dorians were no true sons of Hellen, but were of some other northerly ancestry; or that they were merely Achaean exiles; and in either case that their historic predominance resulted from an act of violence, ill-disguised by their association with the ancient claims of the Peloponnesian Heraclidae; (2) on behalf of the Dorian aristocracies, that they were in some special sense " sons of Hellen," if not the only genuine Hellenes; the rest of the European Greeks, and in particular the anti-Dorian Athenians (with their marked likeness to Ionians), being regarded as Hellenized barbarians of " Pelasgian " origin (see Pelasgians).