Herodotus, Histories 1.57.2 · 1.57.2
Placia and Scylace
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καὶ τῶν Πλακίην τε καὶ Σκυλάκην Πελασγῶν οἰκησάντων ἐν Ἑλλησπόντῳ, οἳ σύνοικοι ἐγένοντο Ἀθηναίοισι, καὶ ὅσα ἄλλα Πελασγικὰ ἐόντα πολίσματα τὸ οὔνομα μετέβαλε· εἰ τούτοισι τεκμαιρόμενον δεῖ λέγειν, ἦσαν οἱ Πελασγοὶ βάρβαρον γλῶσσαν ἱέντες.
and by the Pelasgians who settled at Placia and Scylace on the Hellespont, who became fellow settlers with the Athenians, and by as many other towns as were Pelasgian and changed their name: if one must judge by these, the Pelasgians spoke a language that was not Greek.
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The setting
Herodotus adds two more surviving Pelasgian towns to his case, both on the Hellespont, before drawing his conclusion.
A note on this passage
A second witness follows the first: the Pelasgians who once lived at Plakiēn and Skylakēn, Placia and Scylace, towns on the Hellespont that by Herodotus's day had become synoikoi, fellow settlers, with the Athenians. The detail is pointed, since Athens itself claimed Pelasgian ancestry through its own soil; Herodotus is quietly letting his Athenian readers measure their own city against the people they now share territory with on the Hellespont, without saying outright what he thinks the comparison proves.
He adds a third group, more towns than he can name individually, places that were once Pelasgian and have since changed, metebale, their very name, which means they are useless as witnesses precisely because the evidence in their name has already vanished. What is left, judged from the towns that still answer to it, is a verdict: the Pelasgians spoke a barbaron tongue, "barbarian," Herodotus's ordinary word for anything that is not Greek, carrying no particular scorn here, just a simple fact about an unintelligible sound.
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