Greek and Roman Parallel Stories (41)

Hegesistratus, an Ephesian, having murdered

one of his kinsmen, fled to Delphi, and inquired of the god where he should make his home. And Apollo answered: Where you shall see rustics dancing, garlanded with olive-branches. When he had come to a certain place in Asia and had observed farmers garlanded with olive-leaves and dancing, there he founded a city and called it Elaeüs.[*] So Pythocles the Samian in the third book of his Treatise on Husbandry.

When Telegonus, the son of Odysseus and Circê, was sent to search for his father, he was instructed to found a city where he should see farmers garlanded and dancing. When he had come to a certain place in Italy, and had observed rustics garlanded with twigs of oak (prininoi) and diverting themselves with dancing, he founded a city, and from the coincidence named it Prinistum, which the Romans, by a slight change, call Praenestê. So Aristocles relates in the third book of his Italian History.