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[3]

For it is said that the people who set out from Phricium, the Locrian mountain above Thermopylae, put in at the place where Cyme now is, and finding the Pelasgians in bad plight because of the Trojan War, though still in possession of Larisa, which was about seventy stadia distant from Cyme, built on their frontier what is still today called Neon Teichos,1 thirty stadia from Larisa, and that, having captured Larisa, they founded Cyme and settled there the survivors. And Cyme is called Cyme Phriconis after the Locrian mountain; and likewise Larisa is called Larisa Phriconis; but Larisa is now deserted. That the Pelasgians were a great tribe is said also to be the testimony of history in general: Menecrates of Elaea, at any rate, in his work On the Founding of Cities, says that the whole of what is now the Ionian coast, beginning at Mycale, as also the neighboring islands, were in earlier times inhabited by Pelasgians. But the Lesbians say that their people were placed under the command of Pylaeus, the man whom the poet calls the ruler of the Pelasgians,2 and that it is from him that the mountain in their country is still called Pylaeus. The Chians, also, say that the Pelasgians from Thessaly were their founders. But the Pelasgian race, ever wandering and quick to migrate, greatly increased and then rapidly disappeared, particularly at the time of the migration of the Aeolians and Ionians to Asia.

1 "New wall."

2 Hom. Il. 2.842

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