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Pelasgians and Leleges: Using the Past to Understand the Present

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Pelasgians and Leleges: Using the Past to Understand the Present chapter 2 Pelasgians and Leleges: Using the Past to Understand the Present Jeremy McInerney 1 Introduction: Finding the Pelasgians The question of who the Pelasgians and Leleges were has troubled scholar- ship for well over one hundred and fifty years.1 Throughout the nineteenth century there was a general consensus that the Pelasgians were the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece, their tombs marking their physical presence, the lan- guage identifiable with the vestigial stratum of pre-Greek found in words like terebinthos and kissos or place names like Tiryns. Since then the Pelasgian edi- fice has been assaulted on various fronts. Linguistically, even the most ardent believers have had to concede, as Fritz Gschnitzer succinctly puts it, that ‘Ein Zusammenhang der Pelasgisch (Vorgriechische Sprachen) genannten Substrat- sprache mit den histor. P. läßt sich nicht nachweisen.’2 Similarly, since Greece has been marked by an assortment of cultures from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages and earlier, distinguishing a single, distinct ethnic group, an Urvolk as it were, has come to resemble a search for the chimaera. In archaeological terms, the designation ‘Pelasgian’ is even less accurate than terms like Beaker Culture or Globular Amphora Culture. These terms at least point to distinctive mate- rial cultures, even if the equation of cultural practices with ethnic identity is problematic. But one cannot even point to a single ‘Pelasgian’ culture, and so it serves as little more than a portmanteau label, a catch-all term for everything prehistoric yet not identifiably Mycenaean. Dissatisfied with the circularity of the argument that the Pelasgians were the precursors of the Greeks, Sir John Myres wrote an article in 1907 concentrating on the literary sources, an article which in certain respects was unusually prescient. Myres attempted to establish sound methodological principles for determing, if not who the Pelasgians were, then at least who the Greeks thought 1 For treatments prior to the most recent discussions see Lochner-Hüttenbach 1960 and Briquel 1984. 2 Gschnitzer 2000. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi: 10.1163/9789004274952_003 26 mcinerney they were. Proceeding from a position of historical positivism, namely the assumption that the primary sources, properly put in context, could be read as reliable indicators of historical conditions, Myres reached conclusions that were forward-thinking and deserve to be repeated. In the case of both the Pelasgians and the Leleges, he concluded, there is an early period, beginning with a time when there seems to have been a real but evanescent tribe, of limited geographical range, and some peculiarities of culture; and ending, between the sixth and fifth centuries, with a vague cycle of memories, and a connotative usage of the name. To this, in each case, succeeds a fifth-century phase in which, while ingenious theory flourishes, real search for ‘survivals’ of backward folk is perceptible. Then comes the fourth century, regardless of research, reckless of accuracy or scholarship, infatuated with headstrong theory, to which the evidence (such as it is) must conform or be ignored …3 It is remarkable how Myres intelligently distinguished between earlier and later phases in the tradition and recognized how the search for the ‘Pelasgians’ is conditioned by the needs of later periods to identify, clarify and understand their antecedents. When Myres speaks of a ‘connotative usage of the name’ he is referring to the way in which authors of the classical period associated Pelasgian with all that was pre-Greek and uncivilized, in direct opposition to the identification of ‘Greek’ with civilization. In other words he recognized that whatever the historical reality attached to the Pelasgians, they served an important function in allowing the Greeks to give the past meaning, according to which the rise of the Greeks was coterminous with the ascent of civilization. In short, Myres read the Pelasgians as part of a kind of Greek version, avant la lettre, of Whig history, the view that humankind was and is on an ever upward trajectory.4 If we bring the Pelasgian question forward one hundred years we may con- trast Myres’ subtle and flexible analysis with the most recent definition of the Pelasgians, in Der Neue Pauly: Frühgesch. Volk in Griechenland und vielleicht im nordwestl. Kleinasien, sicher bezeugt für Kreta (Hom. Od. 19,177), Thessalia (durch den Namen 3 Myres 1907, 222 4 Despite his accomplishment, Myres’ interpretation of Herodotus’ Greek is not without its problems. Cf. Laird 1933..
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