Ethnicity and Local Myth 229This is how Pausanias narrates the beginnings of Theban history, or, more precisely, the
beginnings of history at the place where Thebes would lie. The story forms part of his
book on Boiotia, a region of Central Greece including Thebes as one of its main centers.
What we read in hisPeriegesisis the product of him travelling, reading, and listening to
the accounts of local informants. The result is a book written in the second centuryAD
describing the various regions of Greece in an attempt to preserve a venerable cultural
heritage bound to places and monuments.
According to the version presented by Pausanias, Theban history began with human
presence at the site where the famous Greek city would later be. There were several
groups involved, some replacing others, some overlapping with their predecessors. Sev-
eral epochs of human activity passed before the city was built. The first tribe, according to
Pausanias, was the Ectenes with their king Ogygos. They died out, destroyed by plague,
before the Hyantes and the Aones settled in the area. They, in turn, were defeated
by invading Phoenicians under the command of Kadmos. While the Hyantes fled, the
Aones were subjugated by the Phoenicians and continued living there in co-existence
with them.
Who were these groups? Apart from the Phoenicians, for us theseethneare hardly
more than names, and we may doubt that Pausanias or his local informants knew much
more about them than we do today. After all, these events had occurred hundreds and
hundreds years earlier and the memory of them was preserved without written records.
What we can do, however, is observe typical narrative formulas. The first ethnic group
stands out by its relation to King Ogygos, who is explicitly qualified as an aboriginal,
an autochthonous hero. These native inhabitants contrast with other tribes invading the
region in later times, first and foremost the Phoenicians. The Hyantes and the Aones,
in contrast, seem to be something in between: neither aboriginals, nor “foreigners,”
but Boiotians. Apparently, this ethnic group, which gave the region its name, was con-
sidered to have been originally composed of sub-groups. In this division, one group
was the Hyantes, who later settled in Phokis, where they are supposed to have founded
a city known as either Hyas or Hyampolis (Ephoros FGrH 70 F 119=Strab. 9.2.3
[C401]). They would thus represent a type of Boiotian identity formation, or ethnogen-
esis, via differentiation. By excluding the Hyantes from their ethnic group, the Boiotians
would have drawn a boundary to define themselves (see, in this volume, Chapter 3,
titled “Mediterranean Archaeology and Ethnicity,” and Chapter 5, titled “Ancient Eth-
nicity and Modern Identity”). In opposition to them, the Aones were included into the
Boiotian ethnos. Etymologically linked with the terrain close to Thebes, the so-called
“Aonian” plain, their name alluded to autochthony. As autochthony implied original
rights to the land and as the oldest rights were regarded to be the most serious ones,
both the link to autochthony and the ancientness of these tribes could be understood as
expressing a higher legitimacy than the later city population could claim (see James Roy
in this volume, Chapter 16, “Autochthony in Ancient Greece”). Chronologically speak-
ing, the Ectenes and the Aones preceded the later city-ethnosof Thebes, the Kadmeioi,
who were named after the foundation hero of thepolis,Kadmos.
However, again, who were the Ectenes, who were the Aones? Pausanias and his contem-
poraries or the local historians, who had written down the early history of the region,
made use of a widespread model of explanation: etymology. Taking existing names as
their point of departure, for example, the Ogygian gate at Thebes or the Aonian plain,