Greece: Painted by John Fulleylove; described by J.A. McClymontM'Clymont, J. A. (James Alexander)
History
Greece: Painted by John Fulleylove; described by J.A. McClymont
M'Clymont, J. A. (James Alexander)
Athens (Greece); Greece -- Antiquities; Greece -- Description and travel
shall have gone hence.” By far the greater part of the observations made
by this writer on Arcadia relate to its religious customs and
traditions; and from the vague nature of the information he obtained
regarding many of its deities and the peculiar rites with which they
were worshipped, it is evident that Arcadia contained more distinct
traces of the old Pelasgic religion, anterior to the theogony recognised
by Homer and Hesiod, than almost any other part of Greece. It was
difficult for a votary of the Hellenic religion like Pausanias to arrive
at a definite conception of the names, the functions, and the outward
symbols of not a few of the objects of Arcadian worship.
According to tradition Arcas had three sons, of whom the second,
Apheidas, was the founder of Tegea, an aggregate of nine villages, and
for a long time the most famous city in the district. He was the
ancestor of Atalanta, immortalised by Euripides in connection with the
Calydonian Hunt, which ranks with the Voyage of the Argonauts, the Siege
of Thebes, and the Trojan War, as one of the heroic legends of Greece.
It is the same Atalanta who is known to us by the story of her conquest
in the foot-race by one of her suitors, Melanion, through the seductive
influence of the golden apples of the Hesperides, which she stooped to
pick up when he threw them in her path. After the hunt she was said to
have brought home with her to Tegea the head and skin of the wild boar
which Artemis had sent to ravage the Calydonian kingdom
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT BASSÆ IN ARCADIA, WITH DISTANT
VIEW OF MOUNT ITHOME
The front of the Temple faces the spectator, and looks to the north. The
reason for the unusual orientation is evident from the conformation of
the ground. The Temple is, in fact, built upon a ridge, and very
extensive sub-structures would have been necessary if the usual
orientation had been followed.]
on account of a slight offered to her in sacrifice. Whether genuine or
not, the relics of the boar, in the form of a great hide, and tusks
three feet long, were exhibited for centuries in the temple of Athena
Alea, and a sculptured head of the boar has recently been found among
the ruins, from the size of which it is calculated that the animal was
six and a half feet long. The tusks were carried off to Rome by the
Emperor Augustus, along with an ivory image of the goddess, but the
well-worn skin was shown to Pausanias when he visited Tegea. He also saw
a relief executed by the great sculptor Scopas, representing the famous
hunt, on the pediment of the temple, which was rebuilt of marble after a
fire, in 394 B.C., and was considered the most beautiful building of the
kind in the Peloponnesus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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