Over at the Kosmos Society the Attican
study group just started translating Pausanias 10.8. 1-2. It is
about the formation of the Amphictyonic League. As in the case of most
eponymous heroes, the question is always whether the hero came first or the
institution named in his honor . Pausanias covers both options by saying
the league was formed by Amphictyon. Or it got its name from the Greek
phrase, ἀμφικτίονες, “they that dwell
round”.
The league was a collection of Hellenic (Greek)
tribes neighboring Delphi dedicated to the protection and administration
of the temple of Apollo there (and according to Wikipedia, the temple of Demeter in Anthele
near Thermopylae.)
Amphictyon was the son of Deucalion (the Noah of
Greek Mythology), the grandfather of Triptolemus, who Demeter made the
daemon presiding over the sowing of grain. (7. 18. 2) Amphictyon was also the brother to Hellen,
ancestor of all the Hellenic tribes.
Greg Nagy from the Center for Hellenic Studies
theorizes in “A
sampling of comments on Pindar Isthmian 8” that after the
European-Greeks victory over the Persians and their Ionian allies (480 BC) we
should consider the word “Hellenes” to only apply to non-Ionian Greeks.
However Pausanias writing much later in history (130AD?) includes
the Ionians as one of the groups of “Hellenes” in the league.
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