[420] Larcher, Chronologie d’Hérodote, ch. viii. pp. 215, 274; Raoul Rochette, Histoire des Colonies Grecques, book i. ch. 5; Niebuhr, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. pp. 26-64, 2d ed. (the section entitled Die Oenotrer und Pelasger); O. Müller, Die Etrusker, vol. i. (Einleitung, ch. ii. pp. 75-100); Dr. Thirlwall, History of Greece, vol. i. ch. ii. pp. 36-64. The dissentient opinions of Kruse and Mannert may be found in Kruse, Hellas, vol. i. pp. 398-425; Mannert, Geographie der Griechen und Römer, part viii. Introduct. p. 4, _seqq._ Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing up their cumulative effect, asserts (“not as an hypothesis, but with full historical conviction,” p. 54) “that there was a time when the Pelasgians, perhaps the most extended people in all Europe, were spread from the Po and the Arno to the Rhyndakus,” (near Kyzikus,) with only an interruption in Thrace. What is perhaps the most remarkable of all, is the contrast between his feeling of disgust, despair, and aversion to the subject, when he begins the inquiry (“_the name Pelasgi_,” he says, “_is odious to the historian, who hates the spurious philology out of which the pretences to knowledge on the subject of such extinct people arise_,” p. 28), and the full confidence and satisfaction with which he concludes it. [421] Herodot. ii. 23: Ὁ δὲ περὶ τοῦ Ὠκεάνου εἴπας, ἐς ἀφανὲς τὸν μῦθον ἀνενείκας, οὐκ ἔχει ἔλεγχον. As far as our knowledge extends, there were no towns or villages called Pelasgian, in Greece proper, since 776 B. C. But there still existed in two different places, even in the age of Herodotus, people whom he believed to be Pelasgians. One portion of these occupied the towns of Plakia and Skylakê near Kyzikus, on the Propontis; another dwelt in a town called Krêstôn, near the Thermaic gulf.[422] There were, moreover, certain other Pelasgian townships which he does not specify,—it seems, indeed, from Thucydides, that there were some little Pelasgian townships on the peninsula of Athos.[423] Now, Herodotus acquaints us with the remarkable fact, that the people of Krêstôn, those of Plakia and Skylakê, and those of the other unnamed Pelasgian townships, all spoke the same language, and each of them respectively a different language from their neighbors around them. He informs us, moreover, that their language was a barbarous (_i. e._ a non-Hellenic) language; and this fact he quotes as an evidence to prove that the ancient Pelasgian language was a barbarous language, or distinct from the Hellenic. He at the same time states expressly that he has no positive knowledge what language the ancient Pelasgians spoke,—one proof, among others, that no memorials nor means of distinct information concerning that people, could have been open to him.