Description of Greece

As you go to the portico which they call painted, because of its pictures, there is a bronze statue of Hermes of the Market-place, and near it a gate. On it is a trophy erected by the Athenians, who in a cavalry action overcame Pleistarchus, to whose command his brother Cassander had entrusted his cavalry and mercenaries. This portico contains, first, the Athenians arrayed against the Lacedaemonians at Oenoe in the Argive territory.[*](Date unknown.) What is depicted is not the crisis of the battle nor when the action had advanced as far as the display of deeds of valor, but the beginning of the fight when the combatants were about to close.

On the middle wall are the Athenians and Theseus fighting with the Amazons. So, it seems, only the women did not lose through their defeats their reckless courage in the face of danger; Themiscyra was taken by Heracles, and afterwards the army which they dispatched to Athens was destroyed, but nevertheless they came to Troy to fight all the Greeks as well as the Athenians them selves. After the Amazons come the Greeks when they have taken Troy, and the kings assembled on account of the outrage committed by Ajax against Cassandra. The picture includes Ajax himself, Cassandra and other captive women.

At the end of the painting are those who fought at Marathon; the Boeotians of Plataea and the Attic contingent are coming to blows with the foreigners. In this place neither side has the better, but the center of the fighting shows the foreigners in flight and pushing one another into the morass, while at the end of the painting are the Phoenician ships, and the Greeks killing the foreigners who are scrambling into them. Here is also a portrait of the hero Marathon, after whom the plain is named, of Theseus represented as coming up from the under-world, of Athena and of Heracles. The Marathonians, according to their own account, were the first to regard Heracles as a god. Of the fighters the most conspicuous figures in the painting are Callimachus, who had been elected commander-in-chief by the Athenians, Miltiades, one of the generals, and a hero called Echetlus, of whom I shall make mention later.

Here are dedicated brazen shields, and some have an inscription that they are taken from the Scioneans and their allies[*](421 B.C.), while others, smeared with pitch lest they should be worn by age and rust, are said to be those of the Lacedaemonians who were taken prisoners in the island of Sphacteria.[*](425 B.C.)

Here are placed bronze statues, one, in front of the portico, of Solon, who composed the laws for the Athenians[*](594 B.C.), and, a little farther away, one of Seleucus, whose future prosperity was foreshadowed by unmistakable signs. When he was about to set forth from Macedonia with Alexander, and was sacrificing at Pella to Zeus, the wood that lay on the altar advanced of its own accord to the image and caught fire without the application of a light. On the death of Alexander, Seleucus, in fear of Antigonus, who had arrived at Babylon, fled to Ptolemy, son of Lagus, and then returned again to Babylon. On his return he overcame the army of Antigonus and killed Antigonus himself, afterwards capturing Demetrius, son of Antigonus, who had advanced with an army.

After these successes, which were shortly followed by the fall of Lysimachus, he entrusted to his son Antiochus all his empire in Asia, and himself proceeded rapidly towards Macedonia, having with him an army both of Greeks and of foreigners. But Ptolemy, brother of Lysandra, had taken refuge with him from Lysimachus; this man, an adventurous character named for this reason the Thunderbolt, when the army of Seleucus had advanced as far as Lysimachea, assassinated Seleucus, allowed the kings to seize his wealth[*](281 B.C.), and ruled over Macedonia until, being the first of the kings to my knowledge to dare to meet the Gauls in battle, he was killed by the foreigners.[*](280 B.C.) The empire was recovered by Antigonus, son of Demetrius.

I am persuaded that Seleucus was the most righteous, and in particular the most religious of the kings. Firstly, it was Seleucus who sent back to Branchidae for the Milesians the bronze Apollo that had been carried by Xerxes to Ecbatana in Persia. Secondly, when he founded Seleucea on the river Tigris and brought to it Babylonian colonists he spared the wall of Babylon as well as the sanctuary of Bel, near which he permitted the Chaldeans to live.