previous next
[21]

Magnetis, also, has been treated by Homer in about the same way. For although he has already enumerated many of the places in Magnetis, none of these are called Magnetan by him except those two places, and even these are designated by him in a dim and indistinct way:1 “"who dwelt about Peneius and Pelion with its shaking foliage."
2Assuredly, however, about the Peneius and Pelion lived those who held Gyrton, whom he had already named, 3 as also those who held Ormenium,4 and several other Perrhaebian peoples; and yet farther away from Pelion there were still Magnetans, beginning with those subject to Eumelus, at least according to the writers of later times. These writers, however, on account of the continual migrations, changes of political administrations, and intermixture of tribes, seem to have confused both the names and the tribes, so that they sometimes present difficult questions for the writers of today. For example, this has proved true, in the first place, in the case of Crannon and Gyrton; for in earlier times the Gyrtonians were called "Phlegyae," from Phlegyas, the brother of Ixion, and the Crannonians "Ephyri," so that it is a difficult question who can be meant by the poet when he says, “"Verily these twain, going forth from Thrace, arm themselves to pursue the Ephyri, or to pursue the great-hearted Phlegyae."
56

1 Homer nowhere specifically names either the Magnetans or their country except in Hom. Il. 2.756,, where he says, "Prothoüs, son of Tenthredon, was the leader of the Magnetans."

2 Hom. Il. 2.757

3 Hom. Il. 2.738

4 Hom. Il. 2.734

5 Hom. Il. 2.301

6 Some modern scholars question the authenticity of this passage. See Leaf's note ad loc.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus English (H.C. Hamilton, Esq., W. Falconer, M.A., 1903)
load focus Greek (1877)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: