GREECE, THE LAND WHERE MYTHS REPLACE REALITY (Myths about Epirus) What is myth and what does it serve? Myth is a narrative based usually on a false story which can not be used as a replacement of history, but sometimes myth might be considered a distorted account of a real historical event. The myth does not differ much from a folktale and usually the boundary between them is very thin. Myth must not be used to reconstruct, however in the ancient society of the so called “”Ancient Greeks”” myth was usually regarded as a true account for a remote past. Surprisingly this ‘tradition’ is descended to the Modern Greeks as well. They never loose the chance to use the myths and the mythology of a remote past and to pose them as their real ethnic history. This job is being done combining the ancient myths with the ones already created in the modern era. Now let’s take a look at two Greek myths, respectively one ancient and one modern, while our job is to prove that even these myths are respectively hijacked or created to join realities not related to each other, but unfortunately propagandized belonging to a real history, the history of the Greek race. Thus before we analyze and expose some of their myths which are uncountable, we are inclined to say that whatever is considered Greek History is completely based on mythical stories, whose reliability and truthiness is deeply compromised for the mere fact that is based on myths not only by the Modern Greeks and especially philhellenes, but even by the ancient authors. One of them Strabo in a moment of self-reflection to the weakness of those mythical stories is appealing like this: Strabo book 13.1.1 πρὸς τοῦτο δὲ συγγνώμης δεῖ καὶ παρακλήσεως, ὅπως τὴν αἰτίαν τοῦ μήκους μὴ ἡμῖν μᾶλλον ἀνάπτωσιν οἱ ἐντυγχάνοντες ἢ τοῖς σφόδρα ποθοῦσι τὴν τῶν ἐνδόξων καὶ παλαιῶν γνῶσιν· προσλαμβάνει δὲ τῷ μήκει καὶ τὸ πλῆθος τῶν ἐποικησάντων τὴν χώραν Ἑλλήνων τε καὶ βαρβάρων, καὶ οἱ συγγραφεῖς οὐχὶ τὰ αὐτὰ γράφοντες περὶ τῶν αὐτῶν οὐδὲ σαφῶς πάντα· ὧν ἐν τοῖς πρώτοις ἐστὶν Ὅμηρος εἰκάζειν περὶ τῶν πλείστων παρέχων. δεῖ δὲ καὶ τὰ τούτου διαιτᾶν καὶ τὰ τῶν ἄλλων ὑπογράψαντας πρότερον ἐν κεφαλαίῳ τὴν τῶν τόπων φύσιν. With this fact in view, I should ask the pardon of my readers and appeal to them not to fasten the blame for the length of my discussion upon me rather than upon those who strongly yearn for knowledge of the things that are famous and ancient And my discussion is further prolonged by the number of the peoples who have colonized the country, both Greeks and barbarians (a clear division put from Strabo-my note), and by the historians, who do not write the same things on the same subjects, nor always clearly either; among the first of these is Homer, who leaves us to guess about most things. And it is necessary for me to arbitrate between his statements and those of the 1 others, after I shall first have described in a summary way the nature of the region in question In any case it is better to inform the opinion about the weakness of the thesis the scientific institutions where they are working upon, elaborating the mythical stories of a remote past. Ancient myth No. 1. Achilles and his clan the Aeacides were (ancient) Greeks. This myth has been often used from the ancient “”Greek””(this term is used for label only) authors, to connect themselves with what they considered or wishing to be their past. The story of Achilles and the story of those people who attacked the place named Troy, is often considered a real story from the ancient authors. It was so romantic even for them to be left aside as a myth, which what really was. The history of Achilles often credited as a Greek hero, is a history of a mythical hero in a mythical story, the epic story of Achaeans who attacked Troy. We won’t try to exclude this story from what really happened, but we will definitely prove that whatever the narrative of Troy was, a myth or a real story, the epic song was not dedicated to the Greek heroes, and none of the participants of that battle can be regarded as Hellenes. The whole account about this event real or fiction, was part and was dedicated to a previous culture and people, that of the Pelasgians. Homer in his epic song as rightly noticed from ancient authors like Thucydides or Strabo, nowhere call the participants of the Trojan War by the name Hellenes. He uses instead the names : 1. Achaeans (Ἀχαιοί, Akhaioí) (used 598 times) 2. Danaans (Δαναοί, Danaoi) (used 138 times) 3. Argives (Ἀργεῖοι, Argioi) (used 29 times) All these names imply the same people who now are wrongly widely recognized as Greeks(or Hellenes), and some modern political clans are working hard to spread the illusion they were such. The truth is that they all represent the population before the Dorian invasion of Peloponnesus , they by no means can be regarded as Hellenes, while the Hellenes are a later small offspring of them, taking the name as usually in those ancient time from a mythical hero Hellen, son of another mythical hero Deucalion. The most celebrated names Achaeans and Achaea, as a result, was given to these people and the region they inhabited. 2 These people were ruled (much earlier that the name Hellenes firstly appearing) by an Egyptian ruler named Danaus. According to the mythology(not the history) he was twin brother of Aegyptus and son of Achiroe and Belus, a mythical king of Egypt. As the old accounts tell us, he named the people upon who he was ruling after himself. Strabo, Book 008.006.009 τὴν δὲ ἀκρόπολιν τῶν Ἀργείων οἰκίσαι λέγεται Δαναός, ὃς τοσοῦτον τοὺς πρὸ αὐτοῦ δυναστεύοντας ἐν τοῖς τόποις ὑπερβαλέσθαι δοκεῖ ὥστε κατ' Εὐριπίδην Πελασγιώτας ὠνομασμένους τὸ πρὶν Δαναοὺς καλεῖσθαι νόμον ἔθηκ' ἀν' Ἑλλάδα. The acropolis of the Argives is said to have been founded by Danaüs, who is reputed to have surpassed so much those who reigned in this region before him that, according to Euripides,"throughout Greece he laid down a law that all people hitherto named Pelasgians should be called Danaans." Obviously the name Pelasgian is equivalent to the name Danans or Argives or Achaeans. 3 The immediate succession of Hellenes in the history of the Pelasgians of Peloponnesus is what causes the confusion among many of us in regard of the name we ethnically label the people who attacked Troy. For the sake of truth the name Hellenes is found one single time among the people portrayed from Homer in his Iliad as the Troy’ attackers (Iliad 2.681): τοὺς ὅσσοι τὸ Πελασγικ ὸ ν Ἄ ργος ἔναιον, οἵ τ' Ἄλον οἵ τ' Ἀλόπην οἵ τε Τρηχῖνα νέμοντο, οἵ τ' εἶχον Φθίην ἠδ' Ἑλλάδα καλλιγύναικα, Μυρμιδόνες δὲ καλεῦντο καὶ Ἕλληνες καὶ Ἀχαιοί, τῶν αὖ πεντήκοντα νεῶν ἦν ἀρχὸς Ἀχιλλεύς Now all those again that inhabited Pelasgian Argos (1) and dwelt in Alos and Alope and Trachis, and that held Phthia and Hellas, the land of fair women, and were called Myrmidons and Hellenes and Achaeans of the fifty ships of these men was Achilles captain. However even though a well-known martial tribe, their number used to represent just a tiny particle of the Pelasgian race. The Hellenes mentioned in this paragraph are different from the people which was considered to be the core of the Hellenic race, who were the Dorians and appeared in this land generations later as invaders of Homeric Hellenes, killing, subduing and driving them out of their land. In the paragraph above the mythical hero Achilles was the captain of the Pelasgian warriors. That Achilles was Pelasgian is easily verifiable, he came from a Pelasgian land (1)(Iliad 2.681), he was worshiping a Pelasgian God : Zeus (Iliad 16.200): Ζεῦ ἄνα Δωδωναῖε Πελασγικὲ τηλόθι ναίων Δωδώνης μεδέων δυσχειμέρου Zeus, thou king, Dodonaean, Pelasgian, thou that dwellest afar, ruling over wintry Dodona and his race was nowhere called Hellenic in the main source but Pelasgian. As a matter of fact he was grandson of Aeacus (Αἴακος) and member of the family clan Aeacidians Aἰακίδης who took the name from the patriarch Aeacus, who was the king of a small island beside Peloponnesus, called Aegina 4 and created the Pelasgic tribe of Mirmidones: This tribe was not originally from Thessaly (and perhaps never been in Thessaly, Macedonia), like Greek propaganda speculates based on some quotes from ancient authors, but from the small island of Aegina Strabo 008.006.016 Μυρμιδόνας δὲ κληθῆναί φασιν οὐχ ὡς ὁ μῦθος τοὺς Αἰγινήτας, ὅτι λοιμοῦ μεγάλου συμπεσόντος οἱ μύρμηκες ἄνθρωποι γένοιντο κατ' εὐχὴν Αἰακοῦ, ἀλλ' ὅτι μυρμήκων τρόπον ὀρύττοντες τὴν γῆν ἐπισπείροιεν ἐπὶ τὰς πέτρας, ὥστ' ἔχειν γεωργεῖν, ἐν δὲ τοῖς ὀρύγμασιν οἰκεῖν φειδόμενοι πλίνθων It is said that the Aeginetans were called Myrmidons, not as the myth has it, because, when a great famine occurred, the ants became human beings in answer to a prayer of Aeacus, but because they excavated the earth after the manner of ants and spread the soil over the rocks, so as to have ground to till, and because they lived in the dugouts, refraining from the use of soil for bricks In the time of Achilles there were not a major race called Hellenes because as Thucydides put it : "because the Hellenes had not as yet been designated by a common distinctive name opposed to that of the barbarians” 5 The name of the small tribe of Hellenes mentioned in the Iliad, might have been reused much later on to refer to the mighty Hellenes we are all familiar with who were essentially different people from the former.