[298] Gladstone’s Homer, i. 305–372.
[299] Id. i. 106–108.
[300] “The Greek mythology was derived from the Pelasgians, and the oracle of Dodona belonged to them.”—Niebühr, Hist. i. 28.
“The Pelasgians were a different nation from the Hellenes: their language was peculiar, and not Greek.... The Pelasgians, as well as the Hellenes, were members of the Amphictyonic association, the main tie of which was religion, in which both nations agreed.”—Niebühr, Hist. i. (Travers Twiss’ Epitome, ch. iii.)
“The royal laws became odious or obsolete, the mysterious deposit was silently preserved by the priests and the nobles, and at the end of sixty years the citizens of Rome still complained that they were ruled by the arbitrary sentence of the magistrate; yet the positive institutions of the kings had blended themselves with the public and private manners of the city; some fragments of that venerable jurisprudence were compiled by the diligence of antiquarians, and above twenty texts still speak the rudeness of the Pelasgic idiom of the Latins.”—Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, vol. viii. ch. xiv.
[301] Gladstone, ii. 173, &c.; Strabo.
[302] Id. i. 294.
[303] Vide, Pastoret, “Hist. de la Legislation,” v. 21.
[304] “The oath taken by the deputies bound the Amphictyons not to destroy any of the Amphictyonic cities, or to debar them from the use of their fountains in peace or war; to make war on any who should transgress in these particulars ... or who should plunder the property of the god (the Delphine Apollo).... This is the oldest form of the Amphictyonic oath which has been recorded, and is expressly called by Æskines the ancient oath of the Amphictyons.”—Cyclop. of Arts and Sciences.
[305] The Ionian federation, composed also of twelve cities, was almost identical. “L’association s’etoit formée d’abord entre les douze cités, en y comprenant les deux îles voisines de Samos et de Chio.... On s’assembloit dans un lieu sacré du Mont Mycale, que les Ionians avoient dediés en commun à Neptune.”—Pastoret, ix. 170. There was also a confederacy of seven states, which met in the temple of Neptune, in the island of Calauria, “and which is even called by Strabo, viii. 374, an Amphictyonic Council.”—Cyclop. of Arts and Sciences, art. Amphic. Council.