The Coming of the Greeks(for example, the Titanomachy, the battle between the Lapiths
and the Centaurs, the expedition of the Argonauts). 91 It is from
Thessaly that many of the heroic genealogies proceed, and, of
course, it was Thessaly's Mt. Olympus that the Greeks re-
garded as the home of the gods.
Linguistic considerations are also pertinent. The differentia-
tion of North Greek from the South Greek dialect of the Linear
B tablets shows clearly enough that by 1200 B.C., Greek had
for several centuries been spoken in the lands north of the "My-
cenaean" zone. 92 Perhaps one can go further. A detailed analy-
sis of the dialectal evidence led Wyatt to the conclusion that
Thessaly was linguistically the most conservative area of
Greece, a residual area from which rather than to which Greek
speakers moved. He therefore assumed "that the PG [Proto-
Greek] world was restricted to Thessaly, though it may not
have embraced all of Thessaly," and he suggested that South
Greek arose when some of the Proto-Greek speakers "moved
away from Thessaly and established colonies elsewhere in the
south of Greece." 93
There is, then, some reason to believe that the great Thes-
salian plain (far and away the largest plain in all of Greece) was
the initial destination of the PIE speakers who came to the
Greek mainland, and that from Thessaly the PIE speakers went
on to subjugate the plains further to the south. If Thessaly was
the original "home of the heroes," we would expect to find that
during the Mycenaean Age there was a greater concentration of
Greek speakers in Thessaly than elsewhere. Unusually good
evidence to that effect comes from what is widely regarded as
the earliest extant piece of Greek literature: the Catalog of the
- In "Argos and Argives in the Iliad," CP 74 (1979): 111—35, I
have argued that the Trojan saga (and the story of the Seven against Thebes)
originated in Thessaly, the Pelasgic Argos. - See especially Garcia-Ramon, Les Originespostmyceniennes, 40—59
(Garcia-Ramon uses the terms "grec oriental" and "grec occidental" for
what I—following Risch's terminology—have called South Greek and
North Greek). - Wyatt, "The Prehistory of the Greek Dialects," 628 and 629.
193