Investigation of the Bee-nymphs of Mt. Parnassus and the ancestral Indo-European strain and Anatolian strains of divination introduced into European Hellas by migrant pre-Aeolian communities.

Thucydides’ History is a rich source for our understanding of the character and interrelations of the ethnic sub-groups of the Greeks and different communities within the Greek world, as well as the relations between Greeks and non-Greek (‘barbarian’) communities. After establishing some key methodological principles relating to studying ethnicity in the Greek world, this chapter explores Thucydides’ contribution to our understanding of Greek ethnicity. It analyses the role of descent and cultural factors in the construction of ethnicity. It also explores the role that ethnicity plays in Thucydides’ description and analysis of the Peloponnesian War.

The main subject of Chapter 2 is the motifs and the content of the Greeks’ myth-historical tales and songs. The Greeks’ past was very clearly structured: the main axis was the battle for Troy with the generations before and after. The more distant past led back to the origin of the world, gods, and men. On the other hand, the stories have led to the present day. Concepts of kinship, mediated by genealogies, played an essential role. This was connected with stories of migrations, colonisation, expulsions, and re-migrations. These narratives served as elements in order to structure the past, to constitute familiarity and difference, to explain relations of friendship or enmity, among the Greeks themselves and in relation to foreigners. We cannot see these stories of migration as evidence for older ‘historical’ events. But they reflect very clearly the dynamics of their time of origin, the time of the so-called Great Colonization. The identity-forming power of the Greek myth-history lay precisely in the fact that it re-located its own experiences into the past. What they had constructed themselves appeared to the Greeks as their past.