[4] Hence we venture to dispute Prof. Schlegel’s supposed origin of “Dodo.” The Portuguese must have been the prior nomenclators, and if, as is most likely, some of their nation, or men acquainted with their language, were employed to pilot the Hollanders, we see at once how the first Dutch name Walghvögel would give way. The meaning of Doudo not being plain to the Dutch, they would, as is the habit of sailors, convert it into something they did understand. Then Dodaers would easily suggest itself.
[5] The Dodo and its Kindred, by H. E. Strickland and A. G. Melville (London, 1848, 4to).
[6] Neu aufgefundene Abbildung des Dronte, by Georg Ritter von Frauenfeld (Wien, 1868, fol.).
[7] E. Newton and H. Gadow, Trans. Zool. Soc. xiii. (1893) pp. 281-302, pls.
[8] Voyage et aventures de François Leguat, &c. (2 vols., London, 1708). An English translation, edited with many additional illustrations by Captain Oliver, has been published by the Hakluyt Society (2 vols., 1891).
[9] E. Newton and J. W. Clark, Phil. Trans. clix. (1869), pp. 327-362; clxviii. (1879), pp. 448-451.
DODONA, in Epirus, the seat of the most ancient and venerable of all Hellenic sanctuaries. Its ruins are at Dramisos, near Tsacharovista. In later times the Greeks of the south looked on the inhabitants of Epirus as barbarians; nevertheless for Dodona they always preserved a certain reverence, and the temple there was the object of frequent missions from them. This temple was dedicated to Zeus, and connected with the temple was an oracle which enjoyed more reputation in Greece than any other save that at Delphi, and which would seem to date from earlier times than the worship of Zeus; for the normal method of gathering the responses of the oracle was by listening to the rustling of an old oak tree, which was supposed to be the seat of the deity. We seem here to have a remnant of the very ancient and widely diffused tree-worship. Sometimes, however, auguries were taken in other manners, being drawn from the moaning of doves in the branches, the murmur of a fountain which rose close by, or the resounding of the wind in the brazen caldrons which formed a circle all round the temple. Croesus proposed to the oracle his well-known question; Lysander sought to obtain from it a sanction for his ambitious views; the Athenians frequently appealed to its authority during the Peloponnesian War. But the most frequent votaries were the neighbouring tribes of the Acarnanians and Aetolians, together with the Boeotians, who claimed a special connexion with the district.
Dodona is not unfrequently mentioned by ancient writers. It is spoken of in the Iliad as the stormy abode of Selli who sleep on the ground and wash not their feet, and in the Odyssey an imaginary visit of Odysseus to the oracle is referred to. A Hesiodic fragment gives a complete description of the Dodonaea or Hellopia, which is called a district full of corn-fields, of herds and flocks and of shepherds, where is built on an extremity (ἐπ᾽ ἐσχατίῃ) Dodona, where Zeus dwells in the stem of an oak (φηγός). The priestesses were called doves (πέλειαι) and Herodotus tells a story which he learned at Egyptian Thebes, that the oracle of Dodona was founded by an Egyptian priestess who was carried away by the Phoenicians, but says that the local legend substitutes for this priestess a black dove, a substitution in which he tries to find a rational meaning. From inscriptions and later writers we learn that in historical times there was worshipped, together with Zeus, a consort named Dione (see further [Zeus]; [Oracle]; [Dione]).
The ruins, consisting of a theatre, the walls of a town, and some other buildings, had been conjectured to be those of Dodona by Wordsworth in 1832, but the conjecture was changed into ascertained fact by the excavations of Constantin Carapanos. In 1875 he made some preliminary investigations; soon after, an extensive discovery of antiquities was made by peasants, digging without authority; and after this M. Carapanos made a systematic excavation of the whole site to a considerable depth. The topographical and architectural results are disappointing, and show either that the site always retained its primitive simplicity, or else that whatever buildings once existed have been very completely destroyed.