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[58]

Myrsilus says that Assus was founded by Methymnæ- ans; but according to Hellanicus it was an Æolian city, like Gargara and Lamponia of the Æolians. Gargara1 was founded from Assus; it was not well peopled, for the kings introduced settlers from Miletopolis,2 which they cleared of its in- habitants, so that Demetrius the Scepsian says that, instead of being Æolians, the people became semi-barbarians. In the time of Homer all these places belonged to Leleges, whom some writers represent as Carians, but Homer distinguishes them, “‘Near the sea are Carians, and Pœonians with curved bows, Leleges, and Caucones.’3” The Leleges were therefore a different people from the Carians, and lived between the people subject to Æneas and the Cilicians, as they are called by the poet. After being plundered by Achilles, they removed to Caria, and occupied the country about the present Halicarnassus.

1 Gargara is the same town called above by Strabo Gargaris, unless he meant by the latter name the territory of Gargara, a distinction we find made below between Pedasa and Pedasis. The author of the Etymolo. gicum Magnum calls the place Gargarus, and informs us that the inhabitants abandoned it on account of the cold, it being situated on Mount Ida; that they founded a new town in the plain, and that the town abandoned afterwards received the name of Old Gargara. The town called Lamponia by Strabo is called Lamponium by Hellanicus and Herodotus.

2 By ‘the kings,’ we must probably understand the kings of Bithynra rather than the kings of Persia, as understood by Rambach (De Mileto ejusque colonize); for if we suppose that colonists are here meant who came to Gargara from Miletus after the destruction of this latter town by the Persians, how could Demetrius of Scepsis say of the Gargareans that, ‘Eolians as they were, or instead of Æolians they became semibarbarians?’ He ought at least to have said, ‘that they became Ionians,’ for Miletus, a Greek city of Ionia, at the time of its destruction by the Persians, was far from being barbarous. But Miletopolis, although from its name and position in the territory of Cyzicus was probably, like Cyzicus, a colony of Miletus, yet might have been peopled with barbarians at the time Gargara received colonists. Mualitsh is the modern name of Miletopolis.

3 Il. x. 428.

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