The first inhabitant and first king of Arcadia, who lifted his people out of the wild with the first huts, sheepskin coats, and the acorn diet, and from whom the Arcadian line descends as father of Lycaon.1
The Arcadians say that Pelasgus was the first inhabitant of their land. Pausanias adds the sensible rider that others must have come with him, for otherwise he would have been a king with no subjects to rule; but he stood first among them in stature and in prowess, and so it was Pelasgus who became king.2
On his birth the sources part ways. Apollodorus records that Acusilaus made Pelasgus a son of Zeus and Niobe, after whom the dwellers in the Peloponnese were called Pelasgians; but he sets against this the word of Hesiod, who declared that Pelasgus was a son of the soil. It is the earthborn autochthon of Hesiod's telling, not the child of Zeus, who founds the Arcadian house.3
On becoming king he became the maker of civilized life. Pausanias says Pelasgus invented huts, that men should no longer shiver, or be soaked by rain, or oppressed by heat; he first thought of coats of sheepskins, such as the poor still wore in Euboea and Phocis; and he checked the old habit of eating green leaves, grasses, and roots that were always inedible and sometimes poisonous. In their place he found the nuts of trees as food — not of every tree, but the acorns of the edible oak. So closely did some keep to that diet ever after that the Pythia, forbidding the Lacedaemonians to touch Arcadian soil, sang: "In Arcadia are many men who eat acorns, who will prevent you."4
By Pelasgus the dynasty descends to his son Lycaon, a parentage all our sources keep: Pausanias names "Lycaon the son of Pelasgus," and Hyginus likewise calls him "Lycaon, son of Pelasgus." Apollodorus adds the mother — Lycaon born to Pelasgus by Meliboea, daughter of Ocean, or, as others say, by a nymph named Cyllene.5
The son proved cleverer than the father. Pausanias says Lycaon devised plans more clever than those of Pelasgus — founding Lycosura on Mount Lycaeus, giving Zeus the surname Lycaean, and instituting the Lycaean games. The dark testing of Zeus that came after belongs to Lycaon and his sons; the father remains only the earthborn beginning from which they spring.6
Pausanias makes him the first inhabitant and king of Arcadia as a land, before any named Arcadian polis in the tradition — Lycosura belongs to his son Lycaon. No passage ties Pelasgus to a specific city on our map; residence stays deferred at regional level.7
⁂
the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story
