Description of Greece

Those who dwell about Salamis say that it was when Ajax died that the flower first appeared in their country. It is white and tinged with red, both flower and leaves being smaller than those of the lily; there are letters on it like to those on the iris. About the judgment concerning the armour I heard a story of the Aeolians who afterwards settled at Ilium, to the effect that when Odysseus suffered shipwreck the armour was cast ashore near the grave of Ajax. As to the hero's size, a Mysian was my informant.

He said that the sea flooded the side of the grave facing the beach and made it easy a enter the tomb, and he bade me form an estimate of the size of the corpse in the following way. The bones on his knees, called by doctors the knee-pan, were in the case of Ajax as big as the quoit of a boy in the pentathlon. I saw nothing to wonder at in the stature of those Celts who live farthest of on the borders of the land which is uninhabited because of the cold; these people, the Cabares, are no bigger than Egyptian corpses. But I will relate all that appeared to me worth seeing.

For the Magnesians on the Lethaeus, Protophanes, one of the citizens, won at Olympia in one day victories in the pancration[*](Boxing and wrestling combined.) and in wrestling. Into the grave of this man robbers entered, thinking to gain some advantage, and after the robbers people came in to see the corpse, which had ribs not separated but joined together from the shoulders to the smallest ribs, those called by doctors bastard. Before the city of the Milesians is an island called Lade, and from it certain islets are detached. One of these they call the islet of Asterius, and say that Asterius was buried in it, and that Asterius was the son of Anax, and Anax the son of Earth. Now the corpse is not less than ten cubits.

But what really caused me surprise is this. There is a small city of upper Lydia called The Doors of Temenus. There a crest broke away in a storm, and there appeared bones the shape of which led one to suppose that they were human, but from their size one would never have thought it. At once the story spread among the multitude that it was the corpse of Geryon, the son of Chrysaor, and that the seat also was his. For there is a man's seat carved on a rocky spur of the mountain. And a torrent they called the river Ocean, and they said that men ploughing met with the horns of cattle, for the story is that Geryon reared excellent cows.

And when I criticized the account and pointed out to them that Geryon is at Gadeira, where there is, not his tomb, but a tree showing different shapes, the guides of the Lydians related the true story, that the corpse is that of Hyllus, a son of Earth, from whom the river is named. They also said that Heracles from his sojourning with Omphale called his son Hyllus after the river.

But I will return to my subject. In Salamis is a sanctuary of Artemis, and also a trophy erected in honor of the victory which Themistocles the son of Neocles won for the Greeks.[*](480 B.C.) There is also a sanctuary of Cychreus. When the Athenians were fighting the Persians at sea, a serpent is said to have appeared in the fleet, and the god in an oracle told the Athenians that it was Cychreus the hero.

Before Salamis there is an island called Psyttalea. Here they say that about four hundred of the Persians landed, and when the fleet of Xerxes was defeated, these also were killed after the Greeks had crossed over to Psyttalea. The island has no artistic statue, only some roughly carved wooden images of Pan.

As you go to Eleusis from Athens along what the Athenians call the Sacred Way you see the tomb of Anthemocritus.[*](Just before the Peloponnesian War.) The Megarians committed against him a most wicked deed, for when he had come as a herald to forbid them to encroach upon the land in future they put him to death. For this act the wrath of the Two Goddesses lies upon them even to this day, for they are the only Greeks that not even the emperor Hadrian could make more prosperous.