Attica later offered an asylum to the Neleidae, descendants of Nestor, who, like the Fitz Alan Stewarts in Scotland, obtained the throne of the country in which they settled. When a son of Codrus, the last of these Neleid kings of Athens, led a colony from Attica to the Asian coast, the most part of the Attic emigrants were Ionians settled in Attica, not Athenians, though some Athenians accompanied them; and the Royal contingent, starting from Athens, settled at Miletus.[1] Thus, in this legend, the people of Attica, in the main, are not Hellenic, not Achaean in origin, but are connected with the Thessalian Hellenes and Achaioi by Royal marriages; while, though not in origin Ionians, they are intermingled, both in Attica and in the Asian settlements, with that seacoast people, themselves only Achaean through the grandson of Hellen, Ion, their king. Historic Greek inquirers understood the matter in that way, and we must first examine their "Pelasgian" theories. With theories ancient or modern, fantastic or scientific, or both scientific and fantastic, about "Pelasgians" and other "races" in the prehistoric south of Europe; with deductions from place-names in Greece, the isles, and the Asian coasts; with speculations about "Aryans" and "non-Aryans," long-headed and short-headed, dark-haired and light-haired peoples, I have nothing to do. We have not statistics of pigmentation in prehistoric or in historic Greece, or craniological statistics. We cannot translate certain fourth century inscriptions from Crete, written in Greek characters, bat in a language which, though not improbably "Indo-European," must have been to Greeks as unintelligible as to ourselves. We cannot even read the characters of Minoan writing. The much manipulated legends of movements of peoples which reach us in Greek books vary enormously, as Pausanias says, from each other, and are no more historical than the Irish legends of the migrations of the Scots from Scythia to Scotland by way of Athens, Egypt, and Spain. My sole object is to make intelligible the version of their own origin which the Athenians and Ionians offered, and to show that they did, in some moods, draw a distinction between their own ancestors and Homer's Hellenes and Achaeans. There _was_ a distinction, in tradition, religion, rites, and customs, but there may have been no great difference in blood and language.