The forests which spread over the plains and darkened the hills of Arcadia were filled with wild boars and bears and deer. The bear especially gave rise to many legends. The Great Bear in the heavens was once an Arcadian maiden, Callisto, whom jealous Hera turned into a bear and whom Artemis, as a favour to her, shot down. But Zeus retransformed the maiden into shining stars, the guides of mariners before and since the night when Odysseus “kept looking ever at the Pleiades and at Boötes setting slow and at the Bear, by surname called the Wain.” Callisto’s son was Arcas, or Bear, and he first taught the forest dwellers, in the country that was to inherit his name, how to raise corn and bake bread. The great oak woods of Arcadia were responsible for the epithet “acorn-eating,” which the riddle-loving priestess of Delphi often applied to the inhabitants. In the time of Pausanias the Arcadian forests were still conspicuous in all parts of the country. Driven gradually from the plain to the mountains they are even there at last yielding to decay. But the waters of Arcadia are as unchanged as the hills. Both the Alpheus and the Eurotas rise within its borders, the former turning westward, as of old, to its haunts at Olympia, the latter winding to the south to delight a new Sparta with its gleaming water and ripple-washed reeds. And the Ladon, the northern branch of the Alpheus, flows on with the impetuous charm and beautiful colour which gave it the reputation of being the loveliest river in Greece. From out of the range of the Erymanthian hills springs the river Erymanthus, which was especially sacred to Pan, as if its reeds above all others could be shaped into tuneful pipes. In the river Gortys the nymphs washed the new-born Zeus. And by the banks of the Aroanius, which flows down a northern valley to join the Ladon, Pausanias, in enviable leisure, awaited Arcadian music. “Amongst the fish in the Aroanius,” he tells us, “are the so-called spotted fish. They say that these spotted fish sing like a thrush. I saw them after they had been caught, but I did not hear them utter a sound, though I tarried by the river till sunset, when they were said to sing most.”