Page "Hyas" Paragraph 2

The Hyantes, descendants of Hyas — or rather of the Hyades, for the fertility of rain-nymphs needs no male consort — were the original (" Pelasgian ") inhabitants of Boeotia, from which country they were expelled by the followers of Cadmus ( Peck ; Pliny's Natural History, iv. 12 ).

Into late Classical times ( as by Pausanias, for example ), Cadmus was remembered as having been a Phoenician, or at least backed by a Phoenician army, and there may be a nugget of political reality at the heart of the myth, that a Phoenician colony established along the Boeotian coast had displaced some of the area's aboriginal inhabitants while absorbing others.