Description of Greece

Wrought in relief at the entrance are the envoys whom the Greeks once dispatched to Aeacus. The reason for the embassy given by the Aeginetans is the same as that which the other Greeks assign. A drought had for some time afflicted Greece, and no rain fell either beyond the Isthmus or in the Peloponnesus, until at last they sent envoys to Delphi to ask what was the cause and to beg for deliverance from the evil. The Pythian priestess bade them propitiate Zeus, saying that he would not listen to them unless the one to supplicate him were Aeacus.

And so envoys came with a request to Aeacus from each city. By sacrifice and prayer to Zeus, God of all the Greeks (Panellenios), he caused rain to fall upon the earth, and the Aeginetans made these likenesses of those who came to him. Within the enclosure are olive trees that have grown there from of old, and there is an altar which is raised but a little from the ground. That this altar is also the tomb of Aeacus is told as a holy secret.

Beside the shrine of Aeacus is the grave of Phocus, a barrow surrounded by a basement, and on it lies a rough stone. When Telamon and Peleus had induced Phocus to compete at the pentathlon, and it was now the turn of Peleus to hurl the stone, which they were using for a quoit, he intentionally hit Phocus. The act was done to please their mother; for, while they were both born of the daughter of Sciron, Phocus was not, being, if indeed the report of the Greeks be true, the son of a sister of Thetis. I believe it was for this reason, and not only out of friendship for Orestes, that Pylades plotted the murder of Neoptolemus.

When this blow of the quoit killed Phocus, the sons of Endeis boarded a ship and fled. Afterwards Telamon sent a herald denying that he had plotted the death of Phocus. Aeacus, however, refused to allow him to land on the island, and bade him make his defence standing on board ship, or if he wished, from a mole raised in the sea. So he sailed into the harbor called Secret, and proceeded to make a mole by night. This was finished, and still remains at the present day. But Telamon, being condemned as implicated in the murder of Phocus, sailed away a second time and came to Salamis.

Not far from the Secret Harbor is a theater worth seeing; it is very similar to the one at Epidaurus, both in size and in style. Behind it is built one side of a race-course, which not only itself holds up the theater, but also in turn uses it as a support.

There are three temples close together, one of Apollo, one of Artemis, and a third of Dionysus. Apollo has a naked wooden image of native workmanship, but Artemis is dressed, and so, too, is Dionysus, who is, moreover, represented with a beard. The sanctuary of Asclepius is not here, but in another place, and his image is of stone, and seated.

Of the gods, the Aeginetans worship most Hecate, in whose honor every year they celebrate mystic rites which, they say, Orpheus the Thracian established among them. Within the enclosure is a temple; its wooden image is the work of Myron,[*](fl. c. 460 B.C.) and it has one face and one body. It was Alcamenes,[*](A contemporary of Pheidias.) in my opinion, who first made three images of Hecate attached to one another, a figure called by the Athenians Epipurgidia (on the Tower); it stands beside the temple of the Wingless Victory.