The Aeolians are one of the four main divisions of ancestral Greeks, or Hellenes; the others are the Achaeans, Ionians, and Dorians. A form (or order) of architecture, known as Aeolic, was named after the Aeolians.
ORIGINS
The origins of the Aeolians are unclear. They are only known to history as speakers of one of the several dialects that rose to dominance during the Greek Dark Ages after the collapse of the Mycenaeans in about 1200 b. c.e. Their ancestors were among the groups of indo-European speakers who began filtering into Greece, probably mostly in small groups, sometime after the fourth millennium b. c.e. and for many centuries thereafter. There is no evidence to pinpoint exactly when during this long period their direct ancestors entered Greece. Earlier theories of waves of indo-European invaders who displaced pre-Hellenic (or Aegean) populations called Pelasgians by later Greeks have largely been abandoned.
By the end of the Dark Ages in the late ninth century b. c.e. Aeolians were living in Thessaly, a broad plain in north-central Greece bordered by the mountains Pindus and Ossa and the Aegean Sea. Aeolic speakers were also dominant in Boeotia, the territory of the later classical city-state of Thebes, which extended down to Attica (the surrounding territory at Athens) and the Gulf of Corinth.
Origin Myth
In his genealogy of the Greeks, or Hellenes, the Boeotian poet Hesiod, who probably lived in the eighth century b. c.e., recorded that the Aeolians took their name from Aeolus, who ruled over Thessaly as his inheritance from his father, Hellen, the legendary ancestor of all Greeks. Hellen was the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only two mortals to survive a devastating flood, which was sent by Zeus to destroy humankind because of his disgust at the cannibalism practiced in Arcadia, a region of Greece. The Arcadians persisted in sacrificing a boy every year to Zeus; when the god went in mortal disguise to investigate, he was offered soup made from the boy’s intestines. Enraged, Zeus turned everyone at the gruesome meal into a wolf then sent the all-engulfing floods. Deucalion and Pyrrha, who survived in a wooden chest, landed on the heights of Mount Parnassus. Their son, Hellen, gave birth to Dorus (supposed progenitor of the Dorians), Xouthus (from whom were born Ion and Achaeus, the progenitors of the Ionians and Achaeans), and Aeolus (father of the Aeolians). Mythological history holds that the Aeolians were driven from parts of Thessaly by the descendants of Dorus (the Dorians) while being ruled by Lapithes, the grandson of Aeolus. The son of Lapithes, called Lesbos, sailed from Thessaly to the island that thereafter took its name from him.
LANGUAGE
Aeolic, the Greek spoken by the Aeolians on mainland Greece, as well as parts of Asia Minor and the Near East, is regarded as one of the oldest forms of Hellenic speech. (Many of the words in ancient Greek are not of Indo-European origin and must have been borrowed from the pre-Hellenic population.)
HISTORY
Migrations to Asia Minor
Between 1225 and 1175 b. c.e. the Bronze Age civilizations around the Mediterranean, including that of the Mycenaeans, entered a period of sharp decline, the cause of which is still uncertain; it may have been caused by a combination of natural disasters, civil strife, piracy, and famine brought on by climate change, such as a period of severe drought. Possibly to escape these conditions, many Aeolians apparently began to migrate eastward over the Aegean Sea. Between 1130 and 1000 b. c.e., the Aeolians made a great migration across the Aegean, inhabiting the island of Lesbos and the northwest coast of Asia Minor, between the Dardanelles (the strait linking the Aegean with the Sea of Marmara and Black Sea, and called in ancient times the Hellespont) in the north and the Hermus River in the south. Judging by later settlements, the Aeolians colonized other areas of the Mediterranean as well.
Aeolis
By the time written records were being made by Greeks, the cities of Asia Minor founded by the Aeolians (in the northwestern Anatolian Peninsula) were known collectively as Aeolis (or Aiolis). The Greek historian Herodotus identified 12 cities forming the Aeolian League, for defense and trade, in opposition to the Ionian League. These were Temnos, Smyrna, Pitane, Neonteichos, Aegirusa, Notium, Killa, Cyme, Gryneum, Larissa, Myrina, and Aegae; many other cities were founded as well. They flourished in an area that was more fertile and wetter than Ionia to the south in Asia Minor and were concerned mainly with farming. By the eighth century B. C.E., because of increasing trade contacts throughout the region, the use of an alphabet borrowed and modified from the Phoenicians spread throughout the Hellenic peoples of Greece, both on the mainland and on Aegean islands and in Asia Minor. Iron smelting, thought to have been developed in Greece when imports of copper and tin used to make bronze dwindled with the demise of the Mycenaean trade networks, also spread throughout the Hellenic population, revolutionizing farming as iron plows came into use.
Originally the cities were governed by kings, as they had been on the mainland, but in the seventh century B. C.E., many of the kings were driven out and replaced by oligarchies or tyrants. For a time Lesbos was the most powerful settlement of the Aeolians and exercised substantial control over the Asia Minor settlements. In 570 b. c.e. the Aeolians of Lesbos founded the colony of Naucratis in Egypt.
Warfare
During the mid-sixth century b. c.e. armies out of Lydia in western Asia Minor, under the leadership of Croesus, the last king of the Lydian empire, conquered the Greek cities of Asia Minor. The Aeolians of Lesbos entered into a treaty with Croesus, increasing Lydian seafaring capabilities. The Persians (people of present-day Iran) under Cyrus II conquered the Lydians, consolidating much of the Near East under their rule. Cyrus set up a tyrant to rule Lesbos. The Aeolians, who signed a treaty with the Persians in 546 b. c.e., revolted but were subjugated entirely after their defeat at Lade in 494 B. C.E. Aeolians accompanied the Persian emperor Xerxes I in his invasion of mainland Greece with 60 ships in 480 b. c.e. After the Persian army, a formidable force that modern scholars believe to have been composed of about 200,000 men and 1,000 ships, suffered a defeat at the Battle of Mycale in 479 b. c.e., the
Aeolians of Lesbos joined with the Greeks of the mainland against the Persians.
The alliance seems to indicate that a strong cultural identity existed among the Hellenes, despite their differences. Indeed, over the next centuries, distinctions among the Aeolians, Ionians, and Dorians received less emphasis as various city-states became the determining political entities.
CULTURE (see also Greeks)
The architecture of the Aeolians owed much to the Ionian architecture of Ionia in Asia Minor. Temples were constructed out of stone, usually limestone, painted white with marble dust. The Aeolic order of columns resembles Ionic columns, except for the capital, which has a palmette thrusting up between two volutes, or carved spirals.
Two of the earliest—seventh to sixth century B. C.E.—and most renowned Greek Lyric poets (who composed shorter poems accompanied by the lyre and sung with a different meter from that of the Homeric epics) were from Lesbos: Sappho and Alcaeus. Both were strongly influenced by the earlier Homeric poetry, including the Iliad and the Odyssey, which many believe originated in northern Greece, as oral poetry in the Aeolic dialect, though the main language of Homer was passed down to us as principally Ionic, with some Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot features. It was strictly a literary dialect, used only in Homeric verse.
In the Homeric poems the terms Hellene, Ionian, Dorian, and Aeolian, if they appear at all, refer only to small groups from distinct geographic areas. on mainland Greece the differences among the various groups of Greeks were not clearly to be found. For example, the Corinthians, living in a city with a name derived from the pre-Hellenic inhabitants, were mainly of Aeolian descent but spoke Doric. The flood myth must have originated in an effort to explain the three different and clearly defined Greek populations of Asia Minor: the Aeolians, who lived in the north of the Anatolian Peninsula; the Ionians, who inhabited the middle; and the Dorians, who lived in Caria in the south. Although the myth is generally close in its broad outlines to the known movements of different peoples throughout Greece and the relationship of the Greeks, it vastly simplifies the much more complicated interactions that occurred. The Aeolians, Achaeans, and Ionians
AEQUI
Location:
West-central Italy
Time period:
C. 600 to 304 B. C.E.
Ancestry:
Italic
Language:
Aequian (Italic)
Aequi time line
B. C.E.
C. sixth century Aequi migrate into northern Latium from central Apennines as power of Etruscans declines.
C. 500 Aequi are pushed into and attack Roman territory.
C. 493 Romans sign treaty with Latins and Hernici, in response to alliance of Aequi and Volsci.
457 Aequi defeat Romans at Mt. Algidus.
431 Romans defeat Aequi at Mt. Algidus.
304 At end of Second Samnite War Rome secures ultimate control over all of Latium; Aequi are incorporated with limited voting rights into Roman Republic.
Constitute one group of people, who diverged slightly in language as they settled in different parts of Greece and conquered and intermixed with preexisting tribes. The Dorians were a separate group, also Indo-European and from the north who moved into Greece, intermixing with and—possibly—conquering or putting pressure on the remnants of earlier peoples, who either remained or migrated.
World History
