PYDKA PYLOS 103 geur. After the surrender he was elected to the national assembly from one of the city districts; but he appeared only once at the debates. On the outbreak of the insurrec- tion of the commune (March 18, 1871), he was chosen a member of the communal body by the tenth Paris arrondissement. Here his course, throughout the insurrection, was very arbi- trary. Most of the acts of violence were sup- ported by him, and he was chiefly instrumen- tal in the suppression of many of the Paris journals for articles which he deemed hostile to the commune's rule. He was successively a member of the first executive committee of the commune, of several special commissions, and of the committee of public safety, under whose rule the last acts of the communists were perpetrated. On the capture of Paris by the Versailles troops he made his escape, and has since lived chiefly in London. Here, in June, 1874, after the artist Courbet had been condemned to pay the cost of reerecting the column Vendome, Pyat published a protest, assuming himself all responsibility for the de- cree under which the column was destroyed. PYDNA (now Kitro), an ancient town of southern Macedonia, near the W. shore of the Thermaic gulf. It was a Greek colony, but was repeatedly subjected by the Macedonian kings, and finally by Philip, who enlarged and fortified it. Here ^Emilius Paulus vanquished Perseus, the last king of Macedon (168 B. C.). Under the Romans it was also called Citrum or Citrus, from which its modern name is derived. PYGMALION, a legendary king of Cyprus, whom the licentious conduct of his country- women so disgusted that he conceived a hatred against the whole sex. According to Ovid, he made an ivory female statue of such exceed- ing beauty that he fell desperately in love with it himself, and prayed to Venus to endow it with life. The goddess granted his request. Pygmalion then married the object of his af- fections, and by her had a son called Paphus, who founded the city of that name. (For another legendary Pygmalion, see DIDO.) PIGMY, or Pigmy (Gr. Tn^uat'of, from Trvy//?, the fist, or a measure extending from the elbow to the fist, equal to about 13 inches), the name of a nation of dwarfs believed by the ancients to inhabit the interior of Africa. They were supposed to be about three spans high, and ac- cording to the favorite story they were engaged in constant war with the cranes, their invet- erate enemies. Herodotus speaks seriously of them (ii. 32) as an existing race ; and many recent commentators have believed that the accounts from which he took his information had confounded a small species of African apes with men. The story of a pygmy race was universally regarded as entirely fabulous until a very recent period. Dr. Krapf, a German missionary, was (about 1850) the first to revive the old myth, in accounts of a tribe of dwarf- ish negroes of which he had heard in the un- explored part of S. E. Africa. Du Chaillu's explorations enabled him to give still more definite statements, which were long doubted, but the mystery surrounding the subject was finally cleared away by the discoveries of Dr. Georg Schweinfurth. In the country of the Monbuttoos, between lat. 3 and 4 N. and Ion. 28 and 29 E., during a long time passed at the king's residence (1870) he was brought into actual communication with a considerable num- ber of people from a pygmy race, inhabiting a district nearly corresponding to that indicated by the ancient story. The first of the pygmies whom he examined was brought by the Mon- buttoos to his tent. Dr. Schweinfurth says : " With his own lips I heard him assert that the name of his nation was Akka ; and I further learnt that they inhabit large districts to the south of the Monbuttoo, between lat. 2 and 1 N. A portion of them are subject to the Monbuttoo king, who, desirous of enhancing the splendor of his court by the addition of any available natural curiosities, had compelled several families of the Akka to settle in the vicinity." Schweinfurth soon after saw many other representatives of this strange colony, and even succeeded in carrying away one of them ; but he died before the explorer reached the coast. No one of six specimens that he measured, some of whom were of advanced age, much exceeded 4 ft. 10 in. in height. Their heads were disproportionately large, their shoulders peculiar in shape, with crooked and singularly formed blades; the chest was flat and contracted above, but expanded below to support the belly, which Schweinfurth says is " huge and hanging." All the lower joints are angular and projecting except the knees, which are plump and round. The feet turn inward, and the Akka " waddle and lurch " in walking. The hands alone are remarkably well formed. The skulls of all examined were prognathous to an extraordinary degree, the facial angles of two of them being respectively 60 and 66. They have a snout-like projection of the jaws, with an unprotruding chin ; the upper part of the skull is wide and almost spherical. At the base of the nose there is an unusually deep in- dentation. Of their country he could only learn that it was scantily watered and probably flat ; that it was politically divided among a considerable number of tribes ; and that there were nine kings. (See DWARF.) PYLOS, the name of three ancient towns of the Peloponnesus, on or near its western shore, one of which was in Hollow Elis, another in Triphylia, and the third and most important in Messenia, on the promontory of Coryphasium. The earlier city on the promontory was for- saken by the inhabitants after the close of the second Messenian war, and the promontory remained deserted until the Peloponnesian war, when in 425 B. C. it was fortified by the Athenian general Demosthenes. It became memorable for the defeat of the Spartans not long after, but at the close of the war passed again into the hands of the Lacedemonians.
