Aeolians Erotic

The Aeolians were an ancient Greek people who lived from the end of the Bronze Age into the Hellenistic era, first in Thessaly and Boeotia on the eastern mainland and then, from about 1100 BC, on Lesbos, Tenedos and the northwest Anatolian coast that came to be called Aeolis. No conquest ended them. Their separate identity dissolved as koine Greek swallowed the regional dialects, and their descendants simply became Greeks: the Boeotians and Thessalians of later antiquity, the islanders of Lesbos, and, until the population exchange of 1923, the Greek towns of the Anatolian shore.

What set an Aeolian apart was mostly speech. Greeks sorted themselves into four tribes, Dorian, Ionian, Achaean and Aeolian, each with a mythical founder, and the Aeolians claimed Aeolus, son of Hellen. In practice the boundary was dialect. Aeolic kept archaic features the others dropped: it turned certain old sounds into p and b where Athenians said t and d, so the word for four came out as pisures rather than tettares, and the Lesbian branch pulled the accent back toward the start of every word. That branch is the one the world remembers, because Sappho and Alcaeus wrote in it at Mytilene around 600 BC, and Corinna used the Boeotian form at Tanagra. Traces of Aeolic sit inside Homer too, beneath the Ionic surface, which is one reason scholars think the epics passed through Aeolian mouths before they were written down.

The Anatolian settlements were a string of small cities, Cyme the largest, that Herodotus reckoned at twelve until the Ionians took Smyrna. He noted that the Aeolians held better farmland than the Ionians but suffered a worse climate. They passed under Lydian and then Persian rule in the sixth century BC, and Lesbos later joined, then revolted from, the Athenian alliance. Religion was the ordinary Greek pantheon with a Lesbian twist: the island's shared sanctuary at Messon honored Zeus, Hera and Dionysus together and hosted beauty contests for women that Alcaeus treats as an established custom. Pittacus of Mytilene, one of the Seven Sages, ruled there and is remembered for doubling the penalty for any crime committed drunk. Hesiod's father sailed the other way, leaving Aeolian Cyme for a hard farm in Boeotia, so the two halves of the Aeolian world stayed in touch.

Two things keep the name in use. Masons in Aeolis carved volute capitals in the seventh century BC that architects still call Aeolic, close kin to the Ionic order. And a Renaissance theorist borrowed the name for the scale musicians now know as the Aeolian mode, the natural minor, though the ancient Aeolian harmonia was a different thing.