From a purely linguistic point of view, an ‘Aeolian’ was whoever spoke a dialect known as Aeolic, which along with Ionic and Doric was a major dialectal grouping of the Greek language. From an anthropological point of view, however, there is more to it: as we see from such sources as Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, an Aioleús ‘Aeolian’ was whoever belonged to a social and cultural grouping of Greeks who distinguished themselves in their rituals and myths from other social and cultural groupings. Thus the Aioleîs ‘Aeolians’ were socially and culturally distinct from, say, the Iōnes ‘Ionians’, as we see for example from the remarks of Herodotus 1.149 about a twelve-city confederation of Aioleîs ‘Aeolians’ located on the mainland of northern Asia Minor, which rivaled a corresponding twelve-city confederation of Iōnes ‘Ionians’ located on the mainland of central Asia Minor. (See under Aeolian Dodecapolis and Ionian Dodecapolis in the inventory of Words and Ideas.) And these differentiated social groupings of Aioleîs ‘Aeolians’ and Iōnes ‘Ionians’—as also Dōrieîs ‘Dorians’—corresponded neatly with the linguistic groupings of the dialects spoken in Asia Minor and in its outlying islands:
1. The Aeolian speakers of Aeolic inhabited the northern part of coastal Asia Minor together with the outlying islands of Lesbos and Tenedos.
2. The Ionian speakers of Ionic inhabited the central part together with the outlying islands of Chios and Samos.
3. The Dorian speakers of Doric inhabited the southern part together with outlying islands like Rhodes.
By contrast with the dialects of these Asiatic Greeks, however, the corresponding dialects of the European Greeks inhabiting the mainland and islands on the western side of the Aegean Sea are in some cases more difficult to track linguistically. Such is the case with Aeolic dialects spoken on the European mainland, notably in Thessaly and in Boeotia. In the case of Thessaly in particular, the various dialects spoken in this overall region are difficult to correlate with the dialect spoken on the islands of Lesbos and Tenedos as also on the facing Asiatic mainland, but it can be argued that both these sets of European and Asiatic dialects are Aeolic; and it can also be argued that the Thessalians figured themselves as true Aeolians in their rituals and myths. And their primary hero, as we will see in the anchor comment at I.02.689–694, was Achilles of Thessaly, figured as the ultimate Aeolian.