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This page is part of the "tools" section of a site, Plato and his dialogues, dedicated to developing a new interpretation of Plato's dialogues. The "tools" section provides historical and geographical context (chronology, maps, entries on characters and locations) for Socrates, Plato and their time. By clicking on the minimap at the beginning of the entry, you can go to a full size map in which the city or location appears. For more information on the structure of entries and links available from them, read the notice at the beginning of the index of persons and locations.
Regions of central Greece (area 2).
Locris was made up of two regions on either sides of Mount Parnassus separated by Phocis. One northeast, along the coast of mainland Greece facing the northern part of the island of Euboea, was called Opuntian Locris (and its inhabitants Opuntes) after the name of Opus, its main city ; the other southwest, along the northern shore of the gulf of Corinth, around the city of Naupactus, was called Ozolian Locris (and its inhabitants Ozolæ).
Mythology knows of a Locrus, eponym of the Locrians, variously related to Amphictyon, a son of Deucalion (he is at times his son, at times his great-grandson). Locrus had for wife Protogenia ("the first born" in Greek), the daughter of Deucalion, who had two sons from Zeus, Æthlius and Opus (the eponym of the city by the same name), of whom Locrus was the "mortal" father. Æthlius was the father of Endymion, who became king of Elis and was himself the father of Ætolus, the eponym of the Ætolians. It is as a result of a fight between Locrus and his son Opus that the former decided to leave the throne to his son and move with some of his subjects to another country, eventually to settle on the western slopes of Mount Parnassus, in what became Ozolian Locris.
Ozolian Locrians, toward the end of the VIIth century B. C., founded the city of Locri in southern Italy, giving it, and the nearby region, the name of their former country. To distinguish this Locris from Greek Locris, it was sometimes called Epizephyrian Locris, after the name of nearby cape Zephyrion, to mean that it was "past (or next to) Zephyrion".