PART
5 –
Ch.XXXIII.20
The
Pelasgians or proto – Latins (Arimii)
(The
Pelasgians from the northern parts of the
XXXIII.
20. Latinii in the
King Telephus, also called Latinus, had reigned, as Dios
Chrysostomos tells us, over the northern parts of the Balkan peninsula, Mesia,
Thrace, north Illyria, Pannonia and Noricum, therefore his had been a kingdom
of the Latin nation during Trojan times.
We also find
ancient traces about the dwellings of the Latinii in the
The blessed region
between the Hem mountains and Adrianopol appears on the Tabula Peutingeriana under
the name Letica. (According to a
folk heroic song – Revista crit. Lit. IV. 27 – the residence of the rich Letin was in Odriu, or Adrianopol).
Lete was the name of an ancient city in
In Mesia superior,
close to Remesiana, on the great communication line between Naissus and Sardica
(
A people, which
belonged to the jurisdiction of Scardona, had in the times of Pliny the name Lacinienses (Pliny, lib. III. 25. 1;III. 9. 16 : a vanished tribe from
Finally, the folk
traditions from
The poet Virgil presents this ancient legend
from the Balkan peninsula under the following prophetic form, in the first book
of his Georgics: “Twice I saw the Roman armies fighting against each other on
the plains of Philippi, with the same weapons; twice the gods on high have
suffered Thessaly, Macedonia, and the wide
plains of Hem (et latos Haemi campos) to get rich with our blood; but a time
shall come, when the peasant, furrowing with his plough the soil in these
lands, shall find pieces of weapons eaten by rust, shall hit his harrow on the
heavy and empty helmets, and shall admire the big bones of those men, unearthed from their graves (I. v. 493
seqq).
The poet Virgil
uses here the words latos Haemi campos
as a geographical name. Probably under this expression he meant the same region
which on the Tabula Peutingeriana appears under the name Letica.
We come now to the
memories about the Latinii preserved in continental and insular Hellada. Here we find the cities Litae in Laconica (Apollod. fragm. 168 – Fragm. Hist. gr. I. 457), Ledon in
A large part of the
Pelasgian proper names though, names which indicated the Latin origin or family
of the people, had suffered in ancient Greek literature a total metamorphosis.
These ethnic proper names had been simply translated with the Greek word eurys,
wide (TN – lat), to which a second
name had been added at the end, or a termination as corresponding to the Greek
language. This way, the son of Telephus
– Latinus appears with Homer
under the name Eurypylos, meaning
the son of Lat(in); Eurymedon is the
king of the giants from the Epirus; Eurythion
is a centaur from Thessaly; Eurythion
is the shepherd of Geryon’s herds; Eurydamas
is a Trojan prince; Eurymachos is
the lord of the Phlegienii from Thessaly; Eurynome
is a daughter of the Ocean or the ancient Istru; Eurydice, the wife of legendary Nestor, whose brother was called Chromios.
The island
In post-Homeric
traditions, Ulysses, the shrewd king
of Ithaca, and the famous nymph Circe,
the sister of king Aietes from near the Euxine Pontos, figure as the parents of
king Latinus (Hesiodus, Theog. v. 1011). By this genealogy, the Greek authors
wanted certainly to indicate by that the Latinii from
In this regard we
have to pay a special attention to the proper names of the nobles of
The historical
analysis of these personal names formed with eurys, on one hand, and
the antique genealogy which presents Ulysses as parent of king Latinus on the
other, indicate quite clearly that the original population of
Finally, we also
note here that in the same maritime region of