Description of Greece

On Helicon, on the left as you go to the grove of the Muses, is the spring Aganippe; they say that Aganippe was a daughter of the Termessus, which flows round Helicon. As you go along the straight road to the grove is a portrait of Eupheme carved in relief on a stone. She was, they say, the nurse of the Muses.

So her portrait is here, and after it is Linus on a small rock worked into the shape of a cave. To Linus every year they sacrifice as to a hero before they sacrifice to the Muses. It is said that this Linus was a son of Urania and Amphimarus, a son of Poseidon, that he won a reputation for music greater than that of any contemporary or predecessor, and that Apollo killed him for being his rival in singing.

On the death of Linus, mourning for him spread, it seems, to all the foreign world, so that even among the Egyptians there came to be a Linus song, in the Egyptian language called Maneros. Of the Greek poets, Homer shows that he knew that the sufferings of Linus were the theme of a Greek song when he says that Hephaestus, among the other scenes he worked upon the shield of Achilles, represented a boy harpist singing the Linus song:—

1. In the midst of them a boy on a clear-toned lyre
2. Played with great charm, and to his playing sang of beautiful Linus.[*](Pausanias misquotes.)

Pamphos, who composed the oldest Athenian hymns, called him Oetolinus (Linus doomed) at the time when the mourning for Linus was at its height. Sappho of Lesbos, who learnt the name of Oetolinus from the epic poetry of Pamphos, sang of both Adonis and Oetolinus together. The Thebans assert that Linus was buried among them, and that after the Greek defeat at Chaeroneia, Philip the son of Amyntas, in obedience to a vision in a dream, took up the bones of Linus and conveyed them to Macedonia;

other visions induced him to send the bones of Linus back to Thebes. But all that was over the grave, and whatever marks were on it, vanished, they say, with the lapse of time. Other tales are told by the Thebans, how that later than this Linus there was born another, called the son of Ismenius, a teacher of music, and how Heracles, while still a child, killed him. But hexameter poetry was written neither by Linus the son of Amphimarus nor by the later Linus; or if it was, it has not survived for posterity.

The first images of the Muses are of them all, from the hand of Cephisodotus, while a little farther on are three, also from the hand of Cephisodotus, and three more by Strongylion, an excellent artist of oxen and horses. The remaining three were made by Olympiosthenes. There is also on Helicon a bronze Apollo fighting with Hermes for the lyre. There is also a Dionysus by Lysippus; the standing image, however, of Dionysus, that Sulla dedicated, is the most noteworthy of the works of Myron after the Erectheus at Athens. What he dedicated was not his own; he took it away from the Minyae of Orchomenus. This is an illustration of the Greek proverb, “to worship the gods with other people's incense.”

Of poets or famous musicians they have set up likenesses of the following. There is Thamyris himself, when already blind, with a broken lyre in his hand, and Arion of Methymna upon a dolphin. The sculptor who made the statue of Sacadas of Argos, not understanding the prelude of Pindar about him, has made the flute-player with a body no bigger than his flute.

Hesiod too sits holding a harp upon his knees, a thing not at all appropriate for Hesiod to carry, for his own verses[*](See Hes. Th. 30.) make it clear that he sang holding a laurel wand. As to the age of Hesiod and Homer, I have conducted very careful researches into this matter, but I do not like to write on the subject, as I know the quarrelsome nature of those especially who constitute the modern school of epic criticism.