Peleiades
Peleiades were the sacred women of Zeus and the Mother Goddess, Dione, at the Oracle at Dodona. Pindar made a reference to the Pleiades as the "peleiades" a flock of doves, but the connection seems witty and poetical, rather than mythic. The chariot of Aphrodite was drawn by a flock of doves, however. A mythic element of a black dove that initiated the oracle at Dodona, which Herodotus was told in the 5th century BC may be an attempt to account for a folk etymology applied to the archaic name of the sacred women that no longer made sense. Perhaps the pel- element in their name was originally connected with "black" or "muddy" root elements in names like Peleus or Pelops and peliganes, Attic polios, Doric peleios grey, old, PIE *pel-, "gray". Peleiades are often confused with the nymphs Pleiades.
