The epithet ἑλκεχίτωνες suggests unwarlike habits, and, though more faintly, it also betokens textile industry. It stands in marked contrast with the ἀμιτροχίτωνες[200] of the valiant Lycians, whose short and spare tunic required no cincture to confine it. It corroborates the negative evidence afforded by the Iliad of some want of martial genius in the primitive Athens. It coincides with the tutelage of Pallas, for the Minerva of Homer has no more indisputable function than as the goddess of skilled industry[201]. All this tends to betoken that the inhabitants of the Homeric Attica were Pelasgian. Again, the autochthonic origin, ascribed to the Athenians in the person of Erechtheus, amounts to an assertion that they were the first known inhabitants of the country: in other words, that they were Pelasgian. The negative evidence is also important. There is nothing in Homer that tends to associate Athens with the Hellenic stem. The want of military distinction deserves a fuller notice. It can hardly be without meaning, that of all the chiefs, considerable in the Iliad by their positions and commands, there are but two who are never named as in actual fight, or with any other mark of distinction, and these two are the heads of the two (as we suppose) emphatically Pelasgian contingents, from Athens and Arcadia respectively. Agapenor, who (being however of Ætolian extraction) leads the Arcadians, is named nowhere but in the Catalogue: Menestheus is repeatedly named, but never with reference to fighting. In the only part of the action of the poem where he is put forward, he shudders[202], and shows an anxiety for his personal safety, much more like a Trojan leader than a Greek one. Yet they were sole commanders, the first of no less than sixty ships, the second of fifty. There are no similar cases. The nearest to them are those (1) of Prothous[203], who commands 40 ships of the Magnesians, and Gourieus[204], who leads 22 of the Enienes and Perrhæbi: both of these are remote, Thessalian, and very probably Pelasgian tribes: (2) of Podarkes, who commands 40 ships, but only as deputy for his deceased brother Protesilaus, who is said to have been not only the elder, but the more valiant[205]. Agapenor, indeed, was evidently dependent in a peculiar sense on Agamemnon, in whose ships he sailed: but this could not affect his position as to personal prowess. The case of Menestheus is the more remarkable from this circumstance, that he is the only independent and single commander in charge of so many as fifty ships, who is not invested with the supreme rank of Βασιλεὺς or King. His father Peteos is however called Διοτρεφὴς Βασιλεὺς (Il. iv. 338), which marks him as having probably been a person of greater importance.