A note on Greek πρυλέες ‘foot-soldiers’ and πρύλις ‘pyrrhic’
The Greek noun πρυλέες, attested five times in the Iliad, appears to denote foot-soldiers as opposed to charioteers and warriors fighting from the chariot. Already in antiquity it was interpreted as a synonym of πρόμαχος ‘champion’, based especially on the apparently similar use of the words in Il. 21.90 and Il. 20.410. Beside this, the noun πρύλις denotes a war-dance, the πυρρίχη, attested in Callimachus Jov. 52, where it describes the dance of the Curetes on mount Ida in Crete: they beat their shields in order to prevent that hostile Kronos hear the cry of the infant Zeus. In a similar way, πρύλις describes the war-dance of the Amazons around the image of Artemis in Ephesus (Call. Dian. 240). Evidence from scholia seems to indicate that Aristotle knew the term πρύλις as describing a ritual funeral dance for a dead king on Cyprus.
The paper assumes that both nouns may go back to a common root PIE *preu̯- ‘to jump’ found also in Vedic prav-, Germanic *frawa-, cf. ON frár ‘swift, lightfooted’, OHG frō ‘cheerful’ (from ‘jumping for joy, frolicking’) and Russian pryt’ ‘to rush, run quickly’. The meaning of πρύλις ‘war-dance’ may immediately derive from a root meaning ‘to jump’. In the case of the πρύλεες it is noteworthy that the term occurs in contexts where the warriors jump down from their chariots in order to continue fighting on foot, joining the πρόμαχοι. Alternatively, the term may simply have denoted ‘nimble, lightfooted’ soldiers.
Πρύλεες could belong to an s-stem *πρυλής or a u-stem *πρυλύς. Since s-stem adjectival simplicia are rare and often backformations from compounds of the type Greek εὐμενής, Vedic sumánas-, it seems more likely that there was a u-stem adjective *prulú- ‘jumping’ with the suffix *-lu- also found in θῆλυς ‘female’, Ved. (AV) dhārú- ‘suckling’. In turn, the noun πρύλις ‘war dance, pyrrhic’ may derive from an adjective *pruló- ‘jumping’ from which the noun *pruli- was derived similar to cases like Lat. rāuus ‘hoarse’: rāuuis ‘hoarseness’.
