There remains one people, the Dolopians, who in the earliest history of Greece are scarcely mentioned at all. They must have occupied a very extensive country, but it was of an Alpine character, and embraced the part where mount Pindus turns round towards the Aetolian frontier: there they must have lived in the valleys in scattered villages. They are mentioned in the Iliad as by no means foreign to the Greeks, any more than Dodona in the Catalogue; but still the poet of the Iliad can scarcely have regarded them as real Hellenes: their name is one of those by which a branch of the multiform and undefinable race of the Pelasgians was designated. The passage in which Thucydides says (i. 2), that in the Iliad Hellenes and barbarians were not distinguished, and which refers to such nations as the Dolopians, must be understood to mean, that Homer mentioned as Hellenic, nations which Thucydides in a strict sense included among the barbarians, for the Homeric geography is based more upon geographical masses than upon the identity of nationality, the latter of which is more carefully attended to by Thucydides. Such also is the meaning of Strabo. Scyros is called Dolopian, and the inhabitants of Euboea and the neighbouring Cyclades are called Dryopians, who in point of origin are the same nation as the Dolopians. Here again we need not have recourse to a migration, which would have had to traverse the mountains and the territories of so many nations: the Dolopians on the Achelous and the Dryopians in the Aegean are names of the same nation, in the same manner in which we find Thessalians in Italy and in Greece. The Dolopians are not mentioned in history except in a passage of Thucydides, where he says that the Achelous flows from mount Pindus through the country of the Dolopians, and in Xenophon’s Hellenica, where we find that they were governed by Jason of Pherae. Afterwards they appear alternately under the supremacy of Macedonia and the Aetolians, until in the end Philip, in his war against the Aetolians and Antiochus, again subdued them. In this condition they are found in the war of Perseus, afterwards they disappear in the general catastrophe of Greece.