MYTHS OF CRETE & PRE-HELLENIC EUROPE

ends. We have no well-informed witness to tell us of their times, their limits of residence, their acts, or their character; nor do we know how far they are identical with or diverse from the historical Hellenes, whom we are warranted in calling, not the first inhabitants of the country, but the first known to us upon any tolerable evidence." The attitude assumed by this cautious historian regarding the Pelasgians is still defensible in these days when different archæologists apply the term in different ways, one holding, for instance, that the Pelasgians were the Ægeans of Mediterranean race, and another that they were a late "wave" of pre-Hellenic conquerors. Grote insisted that all Herodotus knew about the Pelasgians was that they occupied a few scattered and inconsiderable townships in historical Greece and spoke a barbarous language. 1 He pointed out, however, that our term "barbarian" does not express the same idea as the Hellenic word, "which involved associations of repugnance", although derived from it. "The Greeks", he explained, "spoke indiscriminately of the extra-Hellenic world with all its inhabitants whatever might be the gentleness of their character and whatever might be their degree of civilization". All non-Hellenes were, as the Chinese put it, "foreign devils".

Historians who were more inclined than Grote to attach weight to folk-traditions were yet unable to gather much from those of the Hellenes regarding their origin, except that they professed to have come from "the East" and claimed to be descendants of an eponymous ancestor called Hellen. The story of this patriarch and his family is given in the Hesiodic version of the World's Ages myth. When Zeus resolved to destroy the wicked Bronze Race by sending a great flood, he spared Deucalion and his wife

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