Autochthony in Ancient Greece 249and that later his descendant Oxylos returned from Aitolia to found Elis. Mythological
links between Elis and Aitolia are well known, and the complex double migration from
Elis to Aitolia and back again was known already in the sixth century (Gehrke 2003:
11–13). The inscriptions are obviously early enough to be known to Ephorus, and
so no later than the first half of the fourth century; Page (1981, no. 109) dates them
to the fifth century. It is often assumed that the inscriptions were contemporaneous
and put up by agreement of the Aitolians and Eleans. Sordi (1994) argues that
they belong to the period of the Spartan–Elean war (to be dated 402–400), when
Aitolian forces helped Elis (see also, Antonetti 1990: 60–1; and Parmeggiani 2011:
especially 651–5).
The genealogical connection between Aitolia and Elis attested in the inscriptions is not
new, but the claim to Elean autochthony is. Evidently, the claim that Oxylos, founder of
Elis, who came from Aitolia, was a descendant of Aitolos, who had gone to Aitolia from
Elis, allowed the further claim that the Eleans were autochthonous. It is attested only
here, and so has no explanation beyond what can be deduced from the text at Elis. It is
true that, when Pausanias (6.20.15–19) retails the different views held about Taraxippos
at Olympia, one view is that it was the tomb of anautochthoncalled Olenios, while
other explanations involved men from elsewhere. Pausanias may well simply mean that
Olenios was a local man (see the preceding text): certainly, nothing else in Pausanias’ text
suggests an awareness of an Elean claim to autochthony, and Herodotus (8.73) did not
include the Eleans among the autochthonous peoples of the Peloponnese. It is striking
that, despite the strong interest in antiquity in the question of whether, and to what
extent, the territory of Elis was protected by an Olympic truce, autochthony does not
appear in such ancient discussions (see Lämmer 1982/3). Autochthony, always having
lived in the same land, implied a right to that land, and a claim of autochthony was
thus a statement of ownership of one’s territory. All evidence suggests that the claim to
autochthony presented in the epigram in the Elean agora was new, or at least recent,
when it was inscribed. Elean territory was under threat during the Spartan–Elean war
of 402–400, and again in the Arkadian–Elean war of 365–363/2. (The latter war is
somewhat later than Page’s date for the epigrams, and no Aitolian help for Elis is recorded
during the war, but there is no surviving account of the course of the war after the
Olympic Games of 364.) Such a time of threat would have been an appropriate occasion
for the Eleans to claim autochthony.
At Delphi, there were two different traditions of the origins of the citizens of Delphi
(Kyriakidis 2011). One, found first in theHomeric Hymn to Apollo, was that the god led
Cretans to Delphi and settled them there. The other, reported by Strabo (9.3.12), who
names Ephorus (FGrH70 F 31B) as his source, was that the original Delphians were
autochthonous Parnassians, living on Mt. Parnassos. Apollo, arriving from Athens, with
the encouragement of the Parnassians, killed Tityos and Python, and thus the Parnas-
sians settled at Delphi. This second tradition is supported by a scholion to Euripides’
Orestes1094, though the scholion does not mention autochthony. The two traditions
seem radically different, though Pausanias’ fairly long summary (10.6.3–5) of what he
learnt from the Delphians themselves may reflect attempts to reconcile opposing local
traditions and to combine them with literary elements. Whether, in the archaic and clas-
sical periods, the disparate traditions existed side by side, or whether the autochthonous