1. It was through the authority and practice of the Romans that the name of Greeks or Graians came ultimately to supplant that of Hellenes. Out of this fact, which is the most important piece of evidence in our possession, arises the presumption, that as it was the Pelasgians who may be said to have supplied the main link between Greece and Italy, and between the Hellenic and the Roman language, the Graians could not but have been a branch or portion of that people. Now we know that the Pelasgians were cultivators of the plains. Bœotia is, as we have seen, indicated by Thucydides[162] as the richest plain[163] of Greece, and on that account among the parts most liable to the displacement of their inhabitants. It was therefore probably a plain where the Pelasgi would have settled early and in numbers: and it deserves notice, that the Catalogue[164] placing the town of Graia in Bœotia, places it where we naturally assume a large, though now, as in Thessaly, subordinate Pelasgian population to have existed. Nor is the passage in which Aristotle notices the Γραικοὶ adverse to the belief that they were a Pelasgian race. He states that the deluge of Deucalion was in the ancient Hellas: which is the country reaching from Dodona to the Achelous (αὕτη δ’ ἐστὶν ἡ περὶ τὴν Δωδώνην καὶ τὸν Ἀχελῷον). This may include either great part, or the whole, of Thessaly: whether we understand it of the little and Thessalian Achelous, near Lamia, which was within thirty _stadia_ of the Spercheus[165]: or of the great Achelous, which skirted the western border of that country, and whose line of tributaries was fed from the slopes of Pindus. If we understand the Dodona of Epirus, this will give a considerable range of country, all of it outside Thessaly. Aristotle proceeds to say, that there dwelt the Selli, and those then called Γραικοὶ but now Hellenes (καὶ οἱ καλούμενοι τότε μὲν Γραικοὶ νῦν δὲ Ἕλληνες). Thus he describes as Γραικοὶ those who, together with the Selli, were the inhabitants of the country that Homer calls Pelasgic Argos: so that according to him the Γραικοὶ were not Sellic: and the time, when they were thus neighbours of the Selli, was the pre-Hellenic time. This is nearly equivalent to an assertion by Aristotle that the Graians were Pelasgic, for we know of no other pre-Hellenic race in Thessaly[166]. 2. In vv. 695, 6 we find that (Πύρασος) Pyrasus in Thessaly (probably deriving its name from πυρὸς wheat, grain), is described as Δήμητρος τέμενος: and it is the only ground consecrated to Ceres that Homer mentions. It is material that this should be in Thessaly, the especially Pelasgic country: for both slight notices in Homer, and much of later tradition, connect the Pelasgi in a peculiar manner with the worship of that deity. For example, Pausanias mentions a temple of Δημήτηρ Πελασγὶς[167] at Corinth even in his own time. This connection in its turn serves to confirm the character of the Pelasgi as a rural and agricultural people.