Description of Greece

As you go from the source of the river, you will reach first a place called Maratha, and after it Gortys, which to-day is a village, but of old was a city. Here there is a temple of Asclepius, made of Pentelic marble, with the god, as a beardless youth, and an image of Health. Scopas was the artist. The natives also say that Alexander the son of Philip dedicated to Asclepius his breastplate and spear. The breastplate and the head of the spear are still there to-day.

Through Gortys flows a river called by those who live around its source the Lusius (Bathing Riuer), because Zeus after his birth was bathed in it; those farther from the source call it the Gortynius after the village. The water of this Gortynius is colder than that of any other river. The Danube, Rhine, Hypanis, Borysthenes, and all rivers the streams of which freeze in winter, as they flow through land on which there is snow the greater part of the time, while the air about them is full of frost, might in my opinion rightly be called wintry;

I call the water cold of those which flow through a land with a good climate and in summer have water refreshing to drink and to bathe in, without being painful in winter. Cold in this sense is the water of the Cydnus which passes through Tarsus, and of the Melas which flows past Side in Pamphylia. The coldness of the Ales in Colophon has even been celebrated in the verse of elegiac poets. But the Gortynius surpasses them all in coldness, especially in the season of summer. It has its source in Theisoa, which borders on Methydrium. The place where its stream joins the Alpheius is called Rhaeteae.

Adjoining the land of Theisoa is a village called Teuthis, which in old days was a town. In the Trojan war the inhabitants supplied a general of their own. His name according to some was Teuthis, according to others Ornytus. When the Greeks failed to secure favorable winds to take them from Aulis, but were shut in for a long time by a violent gale, Teuthis quarrelled with Agamemnon and was about to lead the Arcadians under his command back home again.

Whereupon, they say, Athena in the guise of Melas, the son of Ops, tried to turn Teuthis aside from his journey home. But Teuthis, his wrath swelling within him, struck with his spear the thigh of the goddess, and actually did lead his army back from Aulis. On his return to his native land the goddess appeared to him in a vision with a wound in her thigh. After this a wasting disease fell on Teuthis, and its people, alone of the Arcadians, suffered from famine.

Later, oracles were delivered to them from Dodona, telling them what to do to appease the goddess, and in particular they had an image of Athena made with a wound in the thigh. This image I have myself seen, with its thigh swathed in a purple bandage. There are also at Teuthis sanctuaries of Aphrodite and Artemis.

These are the notable things at Teuthis. On the road from Gortys to Megalopolis stands the tomb of those who were killed in the fight with Cleomenes. This tomb the Megalopolitans call Paraebasium (Transgression) because Cleomenes broke his truce with them. Adjoining Paraebasium is a plain about sixty stades across. On the right of the road are ruins of a city Brenthe, and here rises a river Brentheates, which some five stades farther on falls into the Alpheius.

After crossing the Alpheius you come to what is called Trapezuntian territory and to the ruins of a city Trapezus. On the left, as you go down again from Trapezus to the Alpheius, there is, not far from the river, a place called Bathos (Depth), where they celebrate mysteries every other year to the Great Goddesses. Here there is a spring called Olympias which, during every other year, does not flow, and near the spring rises up fire. The Arcadians say that the fabled battle between giants and gods took place here and not at Pellene in Thrace, and at this spot sacrifices are offered to lightnings, hurricanes and thunders.

Homer does not mention giants at all in the Iliad, but in the Odyssey he relates how the Laestrygones attacked the ships of Odysseus in the likeness not of men but of giants,[*](Hom. Od. 10.118 foll.) and he makes also the king of the Phaeacians say that the Phaeacians are near to the gods like the Cyclopes and the race of giants.[*](Hom. Od. 7.205 foll.) In these places then he indicates that the giants are mortal, and not of divine race, and his words in the following passage are plainer still:—

1. Who once was king among the haughty giants;
2. But he destroyed the infatuate folk, and was destroyed himself.

That the giants had serpents for feet is an absurd tale, as many pieces of evidence show, especially the following incident. The Syrian river Orontes does not flow its whole course to the sea on a level, but meets a precipitous ridge with a slope away from it. The Roman emperor[*](It is not known who the emperor was, but some suppose that it was Tiberius.) wished ships to sail up the river from the sea to Antioch. So with much labour and expense he dug a channel suitable for ships to sail up, and turned the course of the river into this.

But when the old bed had dried up, an earthenware coffin more than eleven cubits long was found in it, and the corpse was proportionately large, and human in all parts of its body. This corpse the god in Clarus, when the Syrians came to his oracle there, declared to be Orontes, and that he was of Indian race. If it was by warming the earth of old when it was still wet and saturated with moisture that the sun made the first men, what other land is likely to have raised men either before India or of greater size, seeing that even to-day it still breeds beasts monstrous in their weird appearance and monstrous in size?

Some ten stades distant from the place named Depth is what is called Basilis. The founder of it was Cypselus, who gave his daughter in marriage to Cresphontes, the son of Aristomachus. To-day Basilis is in ruins, among which remains a sanctuary of Eleusinian Demeter. Going on from here you will cross the Alpheius again and reach Thocnia, which is named after Thocnus, the son of Lycaon, and to-day is altogether uninhabited. Thocnus was said to have built the city on the hill. The river Aminius, flowing by the hill, falls into the Helisson, and not far away the Helisson falls into the Alpheius.

This Helisson, beginning at a village of the same name—for the name of the village also is Helisson—passes through the lands of Dipaea and Iycaea, and then through Megalopolis itself, descending into the Alpheius twenty stades away from the city of Megalopolis. Near the city is a temple of Poseidon Overseer. I found the head of the image still remaining.

The river Helisson divides Megalopolis just as Cnidus and Mitylene are cut in two by their straits, and in the north section, on the right as one looks down the river, the townsfolk have made their market-place. In it is an enclosure of stones and a sanctuary of Lycaean Zeus, with no entrance into it. The things inside, however, can be seen —altars of the god, two tables, two eagles, and an image of Pan made of stone.

His surname is Sinoeis, and they say that Pan was so surnamed after a nymph Sinoe, who with others of the nymphs nursed him on her own account. There is before this enclosure a bronze image of Apollo worth seeing, in height twelve feet, brought from Phigalia as a contribution to the adornment of Megalopolis.

The place where the image was originally set up by the Phigalians is named Bassae. The surname of the god has followed him from Phigalia, but why he received the name of Helper will be set forth in my account of Phigalia. On the right of the Apollo is a small image of the Mother of the Gods, but of the temple there remains nothing save the pillars.

Before the temple of the Mother is no statue, but I found still to be seen the pedestals on which statues once stood. An inscription in elegiacs on one of the pedestals says that the statue was that of Diophanes, the son of Diaeus, the man who first united the whole Peloponnesus into what was named the Achaean League.