[11] Even so early as the traditional appearance of Cecrops among the savages of Attica, the Pelasgians in Arcadia had probably advanced from the pastoral to the civil life; and this, indeed, is the date assigned by Pausanias to the foundation of that ancestral Lycosura, in whose rude remains (by the living fountain and the waving oaks of the modern Diaphorte) the antiquary yet traces the fortifications of "the first city which the sun beheld." [12] It is in their buildings that the Pelasgi have left the most indisputable record of their name.
Their handwriting is yet upon their walls! A restless and various people--overrunning the whole of Greece, found northward in Dacia, Illyria, and the country of the Getae, colonizing the coasts of Ionia, and long the master-race of the fairest lands of Italy,--they have passed away amid the revolutions of the elder earth, their ancestry and their descendants alike unknown;--yet not indeed the last, if my conclusions are rightly drawn: if the primitive population of Greece-- themselves Greek--founding the language, and kindred with the blood, of the later and more illustrious Hellenes--they still made the great bulk of the people in the various states, and through their most dazzling age: Enslaved in Laconia--but free in Athens--it was their posterity that fought the Mede at Marathon and Plataea,--whom Miltiades led,--for whom Solon legislated,--for whom Plato thought,-- whom Demosthenes harangued.

Not less in Italy than in Greece the parents of an imperishable tongue, and, in part, the progenitors of a glorious race, we may still find the dim track of their existence wherever the classic civilization flourished,--the classic genius breathed.

If in the Latin, if in the Grecian tongue, are yet the indelible traces of the language of the Pelasgi, the literature of the ancient, almost of the modern world, is their true descendant! V.

Despite a vague belief (referred to by Plato) of a remote and perished era of civilization, the most popular tradition asserts the Pelasgic inhabitants of Attica to have been sunk into the deepest ignorance of the elements of social life, when, either from Sais, an Egyptian city, as is commonly supposed, or from Sais a province in Upper Egypt, an Egyptian characterized to posterity by the name of Cecrops is said to have passed into Attica with a band of adventurous emigrants.
The tradition of this Egyptian immigration into Attica was long implicitly received.

Recently the bold skepticism of German scholars -- always erudite--if sometimes rash--has sufficed to convince us of the danger we incur in drawing historical conclusions from times to which no historical researches can ascend.