If so, unconquered Attica and unconquered mountainous Arcadia must have spoken, in early times, "a barbarous language," and exchanged it for the Hellenic, though with the Hellenes they were, according to themselves, but slightly in contact. When we consider the pertinacity of parts of Wales, Ireland, and the western Highlands in clinging to Cymric and Gaelic, this theory of Herodotus seems highly improbable.
Mr. Ridgeway, on the other hand, holding that the Achaeans were "a Celtic tribe" who passed from Epirus into Thessaly, concludes that their language was what the Hellenes of history would have called "barbarous"; that they adopted the speech, Greek, of the Pelasgians among whom they settled, and that the Homeric poems descend from the lays of Pelasgian minstrels, who sang in Greek of the exploits of Achaeans who were Celtic, but became merged in a Greek-speaking Pelasgic population (Early Age of Greece, vol. i. p. 648). If so, the minstrels had entirely absorbed the non-Pelasgian customs and ideas, absence of ghosts, and hero-worship, of pollution, and ritual purification, and human sacrifice, and the professed Olympian religion of their Achaean lords.
To the objection that, if Homer's poetic Pelasgian predecessors had the good Greek, no Pelasgians known to Herodotus spoke it, Mr. Ridgeway can reply that "the Greeks considered Phrygians and Thracians to be barbarous, though both spoke languages akin to Greek; so that, although Herodotus thought the languages of Scylace and Placia" (and of all cities which were, in fact, Pelasgian) "barbarous, this does not prove that it was not closely cognate to Greek" (Early Age of Greece, vol. i. p. 146).
Yes, but why had the language of the Pelasgian minstrels of the Achaean lords, which was excellent Greek, become in the time of Herodotus the language which, to him, was barbarous? I understand Mr. Ridgeway to answer this question by saying that "there is no difficulty in supposing that certain Pelasgians long settled in Etruria, whither they had come from Thessaly, may have again emigrated" (out of Etruria) "from some external or internal cause, and settled in various spots around the Aegean, some of them going to Athens, and later to Lemnos." See Herodotus, ii. 50, 51, for Pelasgians who, when the Athenians "were just beginning to count as Hellenes," settled for a while in Attica. For this fact Herodotus cites Hecataeus. These new-come Pelasgians were unruly, and were banished to Lemnos (Hdt. vi. 137). They later came back to raid Brauron in Attica (Hdt. vi. 138). Let these much-wandering Pelasgians return to Thrace, or, at least, let the Pelasgians whom Herodotus knew in Thrace (and all Pelasgians wherever he knew them) have strolled from Thessaly to Etruria in Italy, and back again to the Aegean, and north to Thrace, and it is certain that their original language, Greek (like jour as derived from dies), must have been diablement changé en route, and quite unrecognisable as Greek by Herodotus (see Ridgeway, vol. i. pp. 144-146, and p. 244; also "Who were the Romans?" Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. iii.).
On the whole Pelasgian question, the most valuable analysis of the evidence, such as it is, appears to me to be that of Mr. Myres in the Journal of the Hellenic Society, vol. xxvii.
My only conclusion is that, whoever the Achaeans may have been, and whatever their language, and whoever the pre-existing population may have been, and whatever their language, the Achaeans imported a new, lofty, and brief-lived set of ideas, customs, a new tone and taste. At the same time, Mr. Ridgeway's arguments in favour of his theory that the pre-Achaean population of Greece spoke Greek, have my assent for what it is worth, though I do not think that the evidence for the hypothesis of Dionysius of Halicarnassus that Thessalian Pelasgians went to Etruria, and that their descendants came back to the Aegean, has valid historical evidence.
[1] Pausanias, vii. i. 11.
[2] "Athenians and Achaean traditions."
[3] Hdt. v. 57, 58, 61. The Cadmeians, till very recently, were regarded as Phoenicians, Semites. Now the name "Phoenicians" ("red men") is understood to mean men of the old Aegean race, and no traces of Semitic import have been discovered in the soil of Boeotia. Thebes itself was "Minoan," not Semitic. Evans, Scripta Minoa, vol. i.