The History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, Volume 1 (of 3)St. John, James Augustus
History
The History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, Volume 1 (of 3)
St. John, James Augustus
Greece -- Social life and customs
We have shown that their dominions extended much further, and included
not Thrace only, beyond the limits of Greece, but a great part likewise
of Asia Minor and nearly every island in the Ægæan. But even these
spacious limits were not wide enough to contain the whole Pelasgian
population; for traversing the Adriatic, they penetrated into Etruria,
and there and elsewhere in Italy, under the name of Tyrrhenians, erected
Cyclopian cities, and deposited the germs of its future
civilisation.[115] Hence the great resemblance which historians and
antiquaries have observed between the Etruscans and the Greeks. Both
were offshoots from the great Pelasgic stem; though the simplicity of
the original race in religion and manners maintained longer its ground
in Italy than under the warmer skies of Greece. In these more western
settlements, however, new tribes sprang up, who in glory eclipsed the
mother race, which they learned to regard with contempt, so that they
bestowed the name of Pelasgi on their slaves. A similar circumstance had
previously occurred in Asia Minor, where the Carians reduced to
servitude such of their brethren as in later times retained the name of
Leleges.[116]
Footnote 115:
Gœttl. ad Hes. Theog. 311. 1014. Οἱ Τυρσηνοὶ δὲ, Πελασγοί. Sch. Apoll.
Rhod. 580. The Pelasgi were the founders of Agylla, afterwards Cære in
Etruria. Steph. Byzant. v. Ἀγύλλα, p. 30. d. Plin. iii. 8. Serv. ad
Æn. viii. 479, who also gives another tradition according to which
Agylla was built by Tyrrhenians from Lydia. Cf. Vibius, Sequest. 421,
who says that the Tuscans were Pelasgi. The Poseidoniatæ, a Tuscan
tribe, entirely forgot their original language, the manners of their
country, and all its festivals, save one, in which they assembled to
repeat the ancient names of kings, and recall the remembrance of their
original home. They then separated with groans, cries, and mingling
together their tears.—Athen. xiv. 81. The Bruttii are said to have
been driven out of their country by the Pelasgi (Plin. iii. 8); who
also settled in Lucania and Bruttium (9, 10). Pelasgi came out of
Peloponnesos into Latium, settled on the Sarna, called themselves
Sarrhastes, and built, among others, the town of Nuceria.—Serv. ad Æn.
vii. 738. A different tradition brings them from Attica; another from
Thessaly, because of the many Pelasgian relics found there.—Idem.
viii. 600. Dion. Hal. i. 33.
Footnote 116:
Nieb. i. 22. Steph. Byzant. _v._ Χῖος, p. 758. b. Victor. Var. Lect.
i. 10. Athen. vi. 101.
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