used, but says that those who in his time inhabited Crestona, Placia, and other regions, spoke a barbarous language, and that the people of Attica were formerly Pelasgic.  He mentions the Pelasgians as remaining to his time in Arcadia, after the Dorians had expelled them from the rest of the Peloponnesus; says that the Samothracians adopted the mysteries of the Kabiri from the Pelasgians; that the Pelasgians sacrificed victims to unknown gods at Dodona, and asked that oracle advice about what names they should give their gods.  These names, taken from Egypt, the Grecians received from them.  Hellas was formerly called Pelasgia.  The Athenians expelled the Pelasgians from Attica (whether justly or unjustly, Herodotus does not undertake to say), where they were living under Mount Hymettus; whereupon the Pelasgians of Lemnos, in revenge, carried off a number of Athenian women, and afterward murdered them; as an expiation of which crime they were finally commanded by the oracle at Delphi to surrender that island to Miltiades and the Athenians.  Herodotus repeatedly informs us that nearly the whole Ionian race were formerly called Pelasgians.[207]

From all this it appears that the Pelasgians were the ancient occupants of nearly all Greece; that they were probably of the same stock as their Hellenic successors, but of another branch; that their language was somewhat different, and contained words of barbaric (that is Phoenician or Egyptian) origin, but not so different as to remain distinct after the conquest.  From the Pelasgian names which remain, it is highly probable that this people was of the same family with the old Italians.[208] They must have constituted the main stem of the Greek people.  The Ionians of Attica, the most brilliant portion of the Greeks, were of Pelasgic origin.  It may be therefore assumed, without much improbability, that while the Dorian element gave the nation its strength and vital force, the Pelasgic was the source of its intellectual activity and success in literature and art.  Ottfried Muller remarks that “there is no doubt that most of the ancient religions of Greece owed their origin to this race.  The Zeus and Dione of Dodona, Zeus and Here of Argos, Hephaestos and Athene of Athens, Demeter and Cora of Eleusis, Hermes and Artemis of Arcadia, together with Cadmus and the Cabiri of Thebes, cannot properly be referred to any other origin."[209]

Welcker[210] thinks that the ethnological conceptions of Aeschylus, in his “Suppliants,” are invaluable helps in the study of the Pelasgic relations to the Greeks.  The poet makes Pelasgos the king of Argos, and represents him as ruling over the largest part of Greece.  His subjects he calls Greeks, and they vote in public assembly by holding up their hands, so distinguishing them from the Dorians, among whom no such democracy prevailed.[211] He protects the suppliant women against their Egyptian persecutors, who claimed them as fugitives from slavery.  The character assigned by Aeschylus to this representative of the Pelasgian race is that of a just, wise, and religious king, who judged that it was best to obey God, even at the risk of displeasing man.