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Hegesistratus, an Ephesian, having murdered
[p. 317]
one of his kinsmen, fled to Delphi, and inquired of the
god where he should make his home. And Apollo
answered: ‘Where you shall see rustics dancing,
garlanded with olive-branches.’ When he had come
to a certain place in Asia and had observed farmers
garlanded with olive-leaves and dancing, there he
founded a city and called it Elaeüs.1 So Pythocles
the Samian in the third book of his Treatise on
Husbandry.
When Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and Circê,
was sent to search for his father, he was instructed
to found a city where he should see farmers garlanded
and dancing. When he had come to a certain place in
Italy, and had observed rustics garlanded with twigs
of oak (prininoi) and diverting themselves with dancing, he founded a city, and from the coincidence
named it Prinistum, which the Romans, by a slight
change, call Praenestê. So Aristocles relates in the
third book of his Italian History.
1 ‘City of Olives.’
Plutarch. Moralia. with an English Translation by. Frank Cole Babbitt. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. London. William Heinemann Ltd. 1936. 4.
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