White Ravens Huxley, George Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Fall 1967; 8, 3; ProQuest pg. 199

White Ravens 

George Huxley 

EUSTATHIOS (pp.1746,61-1747), commenting upon the Raven's 
Rock in Odyssey 13.408, remarks that Pausanias Grammaticus 
had told a story about the origin of the expression CP€vy' ES 

KopaKcxs: "Apollo had declared to the Boiotians in an oracle that 
wherever white ravens were seen by them, there must they settle; 
when therefore they saw flying beside the Gulf of Pagasai ravens 
which boys had powdered with chalk, they dwelt there, and called 
the place Korakes; but later the Aeolians, having expelled them, sent 
thither persons whom they had driven into exile." The same tale is 
to be found in photios s.v. ES KopcxKas (p.2IS Naber). 

A significantly different version is to be found in Zenobios:1 the 
Boiotians at Arne (i.e. Kierion) were told that they would be driven 
from their land when white ravens appeared. Some young men be­
came drunk and seized some ravens, which they whitened and then 
let fly. The Boiotians were distressed at this spectacle because the 
oracle had been fulfilled, and in the ensuing uproar the youths fled 
to a place called Korakes. Later the Aeolians expelled the Boiotians 
from Arne and took (he place as their own. Their wrongdoers they 
transferred to the so-called Korakes. 

A third version of this Thessalian tale is to be found amongst the 
Magnesians of Crete, who, tradition asserted, had come to the island 
from the Peneios valley and the vicinity of Mount Pelion.2 'The god' 
had told the Magnesians settled between Phaistos and Gortyn that 
white ravens would appear when the time had come for them to 
return home. Eighty years after the settlement the white ravens were 
duly seen, but Delphi, on being asked, directed the Magnesians to 
Asia instead, where in the course of time Magnesia by the Maeander 

13.87, in Leutsch/Schneidewin, Paroemiographi Graeci I (Gottingen 1839, repro Hildes­
heim 1958) 78. 

2 O. Kern, Die Inschriften von Magnesia am Maeander (Berlin 1900) no. 17 lines 16-20= 
FGrHist 482 F 3. 

199 



200 WHITE RAVENS 

was founded.s In this version the white ravens are explicitly linked 
with Apollo of Delphi; in the other two the oracle is not named, but 
in all three Apollo sends his special bird, the raven.' 

From the three stories we infer: (1) white ravens were part of Thes­
salian folklore, (2) the Aeolians of Thessaly used to expel persons to a 
place called Korakes (Zenobios), (3) Korakes was by the Pagasitic gulf 
(Pausanias Gr.), (4) Boiotians were at one time settled there (Pausanias 
Gr.). (5) Aeolians expelled Boiotians from Arne (Zenobios),5 and (6) 
later, Aeolians drove Boiotians from Korakes (Pausanias Gr.). The 
chief contradiction between Zenobios and Pausanias Grammaticus is 
that in the former the Boiotians were told by the god that they would 
be expelled from Arne when the white ravens appeared, but in 
Pausanias they were to settle where the ravens were sighted. 

The context of these stories is the eastward thrust of the Thessalians 
who came from Thesprotia and drove the Boiotians out of Arne 
(Herodotos 7.176.4, Thucydides 1.12.3); the Thessalians are the 
<Aeolians' of Zenobios and Pausanias. Of specific interest is the men­
tion of a place called Korakes beside the Pagasitic gulf. Skylax (75) 

places a KopaKal on the eastern shore of the gulf, between Methone 
and Spalauthra, and in view of the evidence of Zenobios and Pausanias 
there is no need to doubt the existence of a placed called Korakes or 
Korakai thereabouts. The proposal of Wace 6 and others to read 
Kopo7T7J in Skylax for KopaKal is therefore unnecessary, though the two 
places cannot have been far apart and may well be identical,7 

The gathering of Boiotian fugitives in the remote country east of 
the Gulf of Volo accords with the, admittedly scanty, archaeological 
evidence for migrations of people in late Mycenaean and Dark Age 
Thessaly and Magnesia. V. Desborough suggests 8 that the Sub­
Mycenaean and later tombs at Theotokou in Magnesia, not far from 
Korope, represent a movement of population, perhaps from the 

8 Inschr. Magnesia (supra n.2) no. 17 lines 1-5. 
4 Cj. Hesiod fr.123 Rzach 8• 

5 Steph. Byz. S.v. "ApVTJ, who equates Thessalian Arne with Kierion, quotes an oracle about 
the Boiotian emigration from the place: "ApVTJ XTIp€Vovaa piv€t BotcfJ-nov eXvSpa. It seems 
that Arne waited in vain, because there is no evidence in favour of the assertion by Stephanos 
that the Thessalian Arne was an a1TOtKOS -rijs BOtWTtas. Boiotian Arne is already named in the 
Homeric Catalogue of Ships (II. 2.507); that there were two places of this name occupied by 
Boiotians need he no more than a coincidence. 

SA. J. B. Wace, "The Topography of Pelion and Magnesia," ]HS 26 (1906) 153. 
7 Cj. Stahlin, RE 11.2 (1922) 1370 S.v. KopaKal. 
8 The Last Mycenaeans and their Successors (Oxford 1964) 138,259. 



GEORGE HUXLEY 201 

northwest, into Thessaly, and there is related evidence for new­
comers at Iolkos nearby.9 It may well be therefore that Boiotians 
were driven from Arne, not only to the former Cadmeian land about 
Thebes as Thucydides says, but also eastwards into Magnesia during 
the overthrow of Mycenaean power in Thessaly. Of this migration 
the quaint tale of the white ravens is almost certainly a memory. 

The story of the ravens at Korakai beside the gulf of Pagasai was 
perhaps part of the local lore of Apollo's oracle at Korope. It is note­
worthy that a decree of Demetrias, dating from late in the second 
century B.C., shows that the oracle, perhaps truly, claimed to be 

. t 10 " I ' , ~ " '''' \ 'I anaen: 011 TO~ apXaLOV TOV fLaVTELOV Kat 7TpOTETtfL7JfLEIIOV ota 7TPOYO IIWII. 

Excavations suggest that the place was already flourishing in the 
sixth century B.C. and the white raven story implies that, according 
to local myth-history at least, Apollo had interests in Magnesia as 
early as the late Mycenaean period of migrations; one may perhaps 
conjecture that in the original version of the white ravens' epiphany 
to the Magnesians in Crete, Korope, not Delphi, had directed the 
colonists' movements from Thessaly to Crete. 

The story of ravens made white by chalk gains plausibility from the 
presence of white outcrops in the ground near Arne (Strabo 439). 
Albinism in ravens is, however, not rare. It is often noted todayll and 
was recorded in antiquity: in Pedasa in Karia, of two ravens said to 
inhabit the temple of Zeus, one had a white throat ;12 Aristotle noted 
that ravens could turn white in cold weather ;13 and in fable the raven 
was originally white.14 Thus it is possible that genuinely white ravens 
prompted the story of the portent sent by Apollo to Boiotians at 
Korakai on the coast of Magne<;ia or to Magnesians in Crete. The 
chalked ravens at Arne would then belong to a secondary develop­
ment of the tale. 

The ravens are of incidental interest. The significant fact is that 
Pausanias Grammaticus and Zenobios recall two stages of a Boiotian 

9 op.cit. 38, 138. 

10 L. Robert, Hellenica 5 (Paris 1948) p.17 lines 13-15. Cf Stahlin, RE 11.2 (1922) 1436-7 s.v. 
Kop61T7J. 

11 I am grateful to my Belfast colleague Gareth Owen, Professor of Zoology, for con­
firming this. 

12 Aristotle, Mirab. 844b8 (137); cf D'Arcy W. Thompson, A Glossary of Greek Birds 
(Oxford 1936) 160. 

13 Hist. Anim. 3.12.1, S19a6. 
14 Ovid, Met. 2.536. 



202 WHITE RAVENS 

migration through Thessaly, a movement which also brought 
Boiotians to Boiotia proper and according to Thucydides (1.12.3) had 
already begun before the Trojan war. Boiotians were expelled by 
Thessalians from Arne, sixty years after the Troj an war according to 
Thucydides, and some of the fugitives, we learn from the raven story, 
made their way not to Boiotia proper but to the eastern shore of the 
gulf of Pagasai. Pausanias does not report what happened to the 
Boiotians who were expelled from Korakes; other writers do not 
help; and to guess is pointless. But it is interesting that a migration 
from inland to eastern Thessaly is also suggested by the evidence of 
dialect: the Aeolic speech of Thessaliotis (the district of Arne) and 
Hestiaiotis-and, one must add, of Boiotia proper-was strongly 
influenced by Northwest Greek, but the Aeolic of Magnesia and pel as­
giotis remained remarkably pure.15 Thus eastern Thessaly may well 
have been a place of gathering for speakers of a pure Aeolic dialect (or 
of proto-Aeolic), some of whom had been driven eastwards by the 
intrusive Thessaloi and other migrants from Northwest Greece at the 
end of the Mycenaean age and later.16 

THE QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY OF BELFAST 

March, 1967 

15 See E. Risch and J. Chadwick (pp. 99 and 114f respectively) in Language and Background 
of Homer ed. G. S. Kirk (Cambridge 1964). 

16 For a Rhodian oracle about white ravens see Ergias, FGrHist 513 F 1 with Jacoby's com­
ments. A new text of the Pausanias fragment is given by H. Erbse, Untersuchungen zu den 
attizistischen Lexika (Berlin 1950) p.21S lines 12ff (= Pausaniae atticistae fragmenta, rP 5); here 
Boiotians are said to have been uprooted by Thracians before settling at Korakes; but this 
seems to be a secondary version of the tale. 

Dr John Barron and Professor W. M. Calder III kindly read a draft of this paper.