Description of Greece

Not far from Pharae is a grove of Apollo Carneius and a spring of water in it. Pharae is about six stades from the sea. Eighty stades on the road which leads thence into the interior of Messenia is the city of the Thuriatae, which they say had the name Antheia in Homer's poems.[*](Hom. Il. 9.151, 293.) Augustus gave Thuria into the possession of the Lacedaemonians of Sparta. For when Augustus was emperor of the Romans, Antony, himself a Roman, made war upon him and was joined by the Messenians and the rest of the Greeks, because the Lacedaemonians were on the side of Augustus.

For this reason Augustus punished the Messenians and the rest of his adversaries, some more, some less. The people of Thuria left their town, which lay originally on high ground, and came down to live in the plain. Nevertheless the upper town is not entirely deserted, but there are remains of the wall and a temple there, called the temple of the Syrian Goddess. A river called Aris flows past the town in the plain.

In the interior is a village Calamae and a place Limnae, where is a sanctuary of Artemis Limnatis (Of the lake). They say that Teleclus king of Sparta met his end here.

On the road from Thuria towards Arcadia are the springs of the Pamisus, at which little children find cures.A road turns to the left from the springs, and after some forty stades is the city of the Messenians under Ithome. It is enclosed not only by Mount Ithome, but on the side towards the Pamisos by Mount Eva. The mountain is said to have obtained its name from the fact that the Bacchic cry of “Evoe” was first uttered here by Dionysus and his attendant women.

Round Messene is a wall, the whole circuit of which is built of stone, with towers and battlements upon it. I have not seen the walls at Babylon or the walls of Memnon at Susa in Persia, nor have I heard the account of any eye-witness; but the walls at Ambrossos in Phocis, at Byzantium and at Rhodes, all of them the most strongly fortified places, are not so strong as the Messenian wall.

The Messenians possess a statue of Zeus the Saviour in the market-place and a fountain Arsinoe. It received its name from the daughter of Leucippus and is fed from a source called Clepsydra. There are sanctuaries of the gods Poseidon and Aphrodite, and, what is most deserving of mention, a statue of the Mother of the Gods, of Parian marble, the work of Damophon,[*](The date of Damophon of Messene has now been fixed in the first half of the second century B.C. (see Dickins, Annual of the British School at Athens, xii. pp. 109, seqq.). For his work at Lycosura see Paus. 7.23.5-7.) the artist who repaired the Zeus at Olympia with extreme accuracy when the ivory parted. Honors have been granted to him by the people of Elis.