The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

But the Pelasgi of Chreston and Mount Athos, are in localities wherein they may as easily be aboriginal as intrusive. Which were they? I cannot make up my mind; I can only exhaust the two alternatives. If aboriginal, they were one of three things, Skipetar, Slavonic, or members of an extinct stock; if intrusive, members of some extinct stock, Asiatic or Italian. How they may have been, this is easily understood.

1. An eastern extension of the oldest Skipetar area would carry a population akin to the ancestors of the present Albanians as far as the Ægean.

2. A southern extension of the Thracian area would carry the ancient Thracian stock as far as Thessaly.

3. Semitic, or other Asiatic colonies, would give us a series of maritime settlements.

4. So would a series of very early Italian colonizations. These we may deduce from some part of Italy, different from the mother-country of the true Hellenic Greeks; and we may, also, assume a difference in the date of the movement. In such a case the Pelasgi may have been Hellenic, as the Anglo-Saxons were Scandinavian; in other words, out of two Italian colonizations one (the Pelasgic) may have been the analogue to the Angle, the other (the Hellenic) to the Danish invasion of Britain.

Of these alternatives I prefer the second and fourth to the first and third.

The name itself seems to have been applied to one stock only, not to several—though the evidence of this is by no means conclusive.

It seems not to have been native. Native names are, usually, more specific and less general. It was a name which A gave to B, not one which B gave itself.

It seems to have been originally other than Greek.

With a strong inclination to see in the Œnotrian conquest of Greece a third rather a second stream of population, and with the belief that the earliest displacement of the original Skipetar population was effected by movements from Thrace and Macedon (by members of the great Slavonic stock), the Greek occupancy being later than this; favouring, too, the idea that the Pelasgi of Macedon were, at one and the same time, indigenous to the soil, and members of the same stock as the Thracians (the stock being the Slavonic); I am opposed to the broad line of demarcation which so many recent authors have drawn between the Hellenic civilization and the Thracian, a line of demarcation which has led them, in many cases, to explain away rather than admit the evidence of several good writers of antiquity, as to the influence of the Thracian music and the Thracian poetry on early Greece.