Listed 2 sub titles with search on: Mythology for wider area of: "ILLYRIA Ancient country ALBANIA" .
ILLYRIA (Ancient country) ALBANIA
They say that the country received its name from Illyrius, the son of Polyphemus; for the Cyclops Polyphemus and his wife, Galatea, had three sons, Celtus, Illyrius, and Galas, all of whom migrated from Sicily; and the nations called Celts, Illyrians, and Galatians took their origin from them. Among the many myths prevailing among many peoples this seems to me the most plausible. Illyrius had six sons, Encheleus, Autarieus, Dardanus, Maedus, Taulas, and Perrhaebus, also daughters, Partho, Daortho, Dassaro, and others, from whom sprang the Taulantii, the Perrhaebi, the Enchelees, the Autarienses, the Dardani, the Partheni, the Dassaretii, and the Darsii. Autarieus had a son Pannonius, or Paeon, and the latter had sons, Scordiscus and Triballus, from whom nations bearing similar names were derived. But I will leave these matters to the archaeologists.
This extract is from: Appianus of Alexandria, The Foreign Wars (ed. Horace White, 1899). Cited July 2003 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains comments & interesting hyperlinks.
But Cadmus and Harmonia quitted Thebes and went to the Encheleans. As the Encheleans were being attacked by the Illyrians, the god declared by an oracle that they would get the better of the Illyrians if they had Cadmus and Harmonia as their leaders. They believed him, and made them their leaders against the Illyrians, and got the better of them. And Cadmus reigned over the Illyrians, and a son Illyrius was born to him. But afterwards he was, along with Harmonia, turned into a serpent and sent away by Zeus to the Elysian Fields.
Commentary: . . Euripides mentions the transformation of the couple into snakes, but without speaking of their banishment to Illyria (Eur. Ba. 1530ff. ), probably because there is a long lacuna in this part of the text. According to Hyginus, the transformation of the two into serpents was a punishment inflicted by Ares on Cadmus for killing his sacred dragon which guarded the spring at Thebes, which Hyginus absurdly calls the Castalian spring. It is a common belief, especially among the Bantu tribes of South Africa, that human beings at death are turned into serpents, which often visit the old home. There is some reason to think that the ancestors of the Greeks may have shared this widespread superstition, of which the traditional transformation of Cadmus and Harmonia would thus be an isolated survival.
This extract is from: Apollodorus, Library and Epitome (ed. Sir James George Frazer, 1921). Cited July 2003 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains comments & interesting hyperlinks.
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