Peleiades

Peleiades (Greek: Πελειάδες, "doves") were the sacred women of Zeus and the Mother Goddess, Dione, at the Oracle at Dodona. Pindar made a reference to the Pleiades as the "peleiades" a flock of doves, but the connection seems witty and poetical, rather than mythic. The chariot of Aphrodite was drawn by a flock of doves, however. A mythic element of a black dove that initiated the oracle at Dodona, which Herodotus was told in the 5th century BC may be an attempt to account for a folk etymology applied to the archaic name of the sacred women that no longer made sense (an aitiological myth). Perhaps the pel- element in their name was originally connected with "black" or "muddy" root elements in names like Peleus or Pelops and peliganes (Epirotian, Macedonian senators), Attic polios, Doric peleios grey, old, PIE *pel-, "gray". Peleiades are often confused with the nymphs Pleiades.[1][2][3][4]

See also

References

  1. Herodotus. The Histories, 2.54.1.
  2. SGA - International Association Terra Antiqua Balcanica, Institute for the Study of Man. The Journal of Indo-European Studies, p. 473.
  3. Yonge, p. 783.
  4. Hutchinson, p. 90.

Sources

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/12/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.