On this point, then, that the Achaeans and Hellenes were more civilised than the pre-existing "Pelasgians," the Greek thinkers were certainly in the wrong. But what about language? Was Herodotus right in holding that the "Pelasgians" spoke a "barbarous" language, and learned Greek from the Hellenes? He admits that he could not speak with any certainty about the language of the Pelasgians. But he infers from the speech of actually contemporary Pelasgians, for example, at Creston in Thrace, and at Placia and Scylace on the Hellespont, "and, in short, of any other of the cities which have dropped the name, but are in fact Pelasgian," that "the Pelasgians spoke a barbarous language" (Herodotus, i. 56-58). If so, unconquered Attica and unconquered mountainous Arcadia must have spoken, in early times, "a barbarous language," and exchanged it for the Hellenic, though with the Hellenes they were, according to themselves, but slightly in contact. When we consider the pertinacity of parts of Wales, Ireland, and the western Highlands in clinging to Cymric and Gaelic, this theory of Herodotus seems highly improbable. Mr. Ridgeway, on the other hand, holding that the Achaeans were "a Celtic tribe" who passed from Epirus into Thessaly, concludes that _their_ language was what the Hellenes of history would have called "barbarous"; that they adopted the speech, Greek, of the Pelasgians among whom they settled, and that the Homeric poems descend from the lays of Pelasgian minstrels, who sang in Greek of the exploits of Achaeans who were Celtic, but became merged in a Greek-speaking Pelasgic population (_Early Age of Greece_, vol. i. p. 648). If so, the minstrels had entirely absorbed the non-Pelasgian customs and ideas, absence of ghosts, and hero-worship, of pollution, and ritual purification, and human sacrifice, and the professed Olympian religion of their Achaean lords. To the objection that, if Homer's poetic Pelasgian predecessors had the good Greek, no Pelasgians known to Herodotus spoke it, Mr. Ridgeway can reply that "the Greeks considered Phrygians and Thracians to be barbarous, though both spoke languages akin to Greek; so that, although Herodotus thought the languages of Scylace and Placia" (and of _all_ cities which were, in fact, Pelasgian) "barbarous, this does not prove that it was not closely cognate to Greek" (_Early Age of Greece_, vol. i. p. 146).