The Oenotrians and Pelasgians

Summary

Concerning the origin of the Oenotrians Pherecydes wrote: that Oenotrus was one of the twenty sons of Lycaon, and that the Oenotrians were named after him, as the Peucetians on the Ionian gulph were after his brother Peucetius. They migrated from Arcadia, seventeen generations before the Trojan war, with a numerous body of Arcadians and other Greeks, who were pressed for room at home: and this, says Pausanias, is the earliest colony, whether of Greeks or barbarians, of which a recollection has been preserved.

Other genealogists have stated the number of the Lycaonids differently: the names which occur in Pausanias amount to six and twenty, and several may probably have dropt out of his text. Apollodorus says there were fifty, and one name is wanting in him. Very few in the two lists are the same: Pausanias has no Peucetius, Apollodorus neither him nor Oenotrus: but what is strangest is, that, though all their names indicate them to have been founders of races or of cities, still the latter mythologer makes them all perish in Deucalion's flood. It is clear that he or the author he followed absurdly mixed up a legend about certain impious sons of Lycaon, who perhaps were nameless, with the tradition which enumerated the Arcadian towns and those of kindred origin according to their reputed founders.