Description of Greece

At Rome the image perished by fire. Of the pair who sinned against the god, Gaius was killed by a private soldier, just as he was giving the password; he had made the soldier very angry by always giving the same password with a covert sneer. The other, Nero, in addition to his violence to his mother, committed accursed and hateful crimes against his wedded wives. The modern Love at Thespiae was made by the Athenian Menodorus, who copied the work of Praxiteles.

Here too are statues made by Praxiteles himself, one of Aphrodite and one of Phryne, both Phryne and the goddess being of stone. Elsewhere too is a sanctuary of Black Aphrodite, with a theater and a market-place, well worth seeing. Here is set up Hesiod in bronze. Not far from the market-place is a Victory of bronze and a small temple of the Muses. In it are small images made of stone.

At Thespiae is also a sanctuary of Heracles. The priestess there is a virgin, who acts as such until she dies. The reason of this is said to be as follows. Heracles, they say, had intercourse with the fifty daughters of Thestius, except one, in a single night. She was the only one who refused to have connection with him. Heracles,thinking that he had been insulted, condemned her to remain a virgin all her life, serving him as his priest.

I have heard another story, how Heracles had connection with all the virgin daughters of Thestius in one and the same night, and how they all bore him sons, the youngest and the eldest bearing twins. But I cannot think it credible that Heracles would rise to such a pitch of wrath against a daughter of a friend. Moreover, while he was still among men, punishing them for insolence, and especially such as were impious towards the gods, he would not himself have set up a temple and appointed a priestess to himself, just as though he were a god.

As a matter of fact this sanctuary seemed to me too old to be of the time of Heracles the son of Amphitryon, and to belong to Heracles called one of the Idaean Dactyls, to whom I found the people of Erythrae in Ionia and of Tyre possessed sanctuaries. Nevertheless, the Boeotians were not unacquainted with this name of Heracles, seeing that they themselves say that the sanctuary of Demeter of Mycalessus has been entrusted to Idaean Heracles.

Helicon is one of the mountains of Greece with the most fertile soil and the greatest number of cultivated trees. The wild-strawberry bushes supply to the goats sweeter fruit than that growing anywhere else. The dwellers around Helicon say that all the grasses too and roots growing on the mountain are not at all poisonous to men. Moreover, the food makes the poison of the snakes too less deadly, so that most of those bitten escape with their lives, should they fall in with a Libyan of the race of the Psyllians, or with any suitable remedies.

Now the poison of the most venomous snakes is of itself deadly to men and all animals alike, but what they feed on contributes very much to the strength of their poison; for instance, I learnt from a Phoenician that the roots they eat make more venomous the vipers in the highland of Phoenicia. He said that he had himself seen a man trying to escape from the rush of a viper; the man, he said, ran up a tree, but the viper, coming up too late, puffed some of its poison towards the tree, and the man died instantaneously.

Such was the story I heard from him. Those vipers in Arabia that nest around the balsam trees have, I know, the following peculiarities. The balsams are about as big as a myrtle bush, and their leaves are like those of the herb marjoram. The vipers of Arabia lodge in certain numbers, larger or smaller, under each tree. For the balsam-juice is the food they like most, and moreover they are fond of the shade of the bushes.

So when the time has come for the Arabians to collect the juice of the balsam, each man takes two sticks to the vipers, and by striking them together they drive the vipers away. Kill them they will not, considering them sacred to the balsam. And even if a man should have the misfortune to be bitten by the vipers, though the wound is like the cut of a knife, nevertheless there is no fear from the poison. For as the vipers feed on the most fragrant of perfumes, their poison is mitigated and less deadly.