On the language of the Pelasgi various opinions are entertained. Some, relying on particular passages in ancient writers, have imagined that it was very different from the Greek,[131] but although in support of such an opinion much ingenuity may be exhibited there are circumstances which compel us to reject it. The Athenians and Arcadians, for example, though of Pelasgian origin, spoke, and that from the remotest times, the same language with the rest of the Greeks; and though the Æolic dialect,[132] the most ancient in Arcadia, or indeed in all Greece, was transformed to Latin in Italy, we are not on that account to infer that Latin bore a closer resemblance than the Greek to the mother tongue of both. The Pelasgian language indeed appears to have been the Hellenic in the earlier stages of its formation, just as the Pelasgi themselves were Greeks under another name and in a ruder state of civilisation. Whether they possessed any knowledge of written characters before[133] the introduction of the Phœnician we have now no means of ascertaining, the passages usually brought forward in behalf of such an opinion being of small authority. To them, however, tradition attributes the introduction of letters into Latium,[134] and there can be no doubt that the use of written characters was known in Greece before its inhabitants had ceased to be called Pelasgi. Footnote 131: Nieb. i. 23. Footnote 132: Palm. Gr. Ant. p. 55. Footnote 133: See, however, the question discussed in Palmerius, Gr. Ant. p. 49. sqq. Conf. Eustath. ad Il. β. 841. Footnote 134: Plin. vii. 56. Tacit. Annal. xi. 14. et Rupert ad loc. Hygin. Fab. 277. p. 336. I have now, I imagine, proved that the Pelasgi whencesoever they came, occupied, under one name or another, the whole continent of Greece and most of the islands. The Athenians, and consequently the Ionians, are on all hands acknowledged to have sprung from the Pelasgian stock. It only remains to be shown that the Dorians also traced their origin to this people, and we shall be satisfied that the whole of the illustrious nation, known to history under the name of Greeks, flowed from one and the same source. The Hellenes, of whom the Dorians were a tribe,[135] occupied in later times the south of Thessaly, but at a much earlier period, along with the Selli,[136] dwelt in the mountainous tracts about Dodona, where they were known under the name of Greeks or mountaineers,[137] which was the original signification of the term. This district of Epeiros, it has been shown, was among the very earliest of the Pelasgian settlements, from which of itself it might be inferred that the Hellenes were Pelasgi. We are not left to rely in this matter on mere inference, since Herodotus states distinctly that they were a fragment of the Pelasgi.[138] Footnote 135: Serv. ad Æn. ii. 4. Footnote 136: Aristot. Meteorol. i. 14. p. 39. Footnote 137: Palm. Gr. Ant. 5. Footnote 138: I. 58.