Pausanias' description of Greece, Volume I.Pausanias, active approximately 150-175
History
Pausanias' description of Greece, Volume I.
Pausanias, active approximately 150-175
Greece -- Antiquities; Greece -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800
As you go on a little to the left from the _Rams_, for so they call
the tomb of Thyestes, is a place called Mysia, and a temple of Mysian
Demeter, so called from a man called Mysius, who was as the Argives
say a host of Demeter. It has no roof. And in it is a shrine of baked
brick, and images of Proserpine and Pluto and Demeter. And a little
further is the river Inachus, and on the other side of the river is an
altar of the Sun. And you will go thence to the gate called from the
neighbouring temple, the temple of Ilithyia.
The Argives are the only Greeks I know of who were divided into three
kingdoms. For in the reign of Anaxagoras, the son of Argos, the son of
Megapenthes, a madness came on the women, they went from their homes
and wandered up and down the country, till Melampus the son of Amythaon
cured them of that complaint, on condition that he and his brother
Bias should share alike with Anaxagoras. And five kings of Bias’ race
reigned for four generations to Cyanippus the son of Ægialeus, being
all descended from Neleus on the mother’s side, and from Melampus six
generations and six kings to Amphilochus the son of Amphiaraus. But
the native race, the descendants of Anaxagoras, reigned longer. For
Iphis, the son of Alector, the son of Anaxagoras, left the kingdom to
Sthenelus the son of his brother Capaneus: and Amphilochus after the
capture of Ilium having migrated to what is now called Amphilochi,
and Cyanippus dying childless, Cylarabes the son of Sthenelus had the
kingdom alone. And he too had no children, and so Orestes the son
of Agamemnon got Argos, as he was a near neighbour, and besides his
hereditary sway had added to his dominions much Arcadian territory, and
as he had also got the kingdom in Sparta, and had ever ready help in
the alliance of the Phocians. And he was king of the Lacedæmonians at
their own request. For they thought the sons of Tyndareus’ daughters
better entitled to the kingdom than Nicostratus and Megapenthes, the
sons of Menelaus by a bondmaid. And when Orestes died Tisamenus,
the son of Orestes by Hermione the daughter of Menelaus, had the
kingdom. And Penthilus, Orestes’ bastard son by Erigone the daughter
of Ægisthus, is mentioned by Cinæthon in his Verses. It was in the
reign of this Tisamenus that the Heraclidæ returned to the Peloponnese,
_viz._ Temenus and Cresphontes the sons of Aristomachus, and, as
Aristodemus had died earlier, his sons came too. And they laid claim
to Argos and its kingdom on it seems to me the justest grounds, for
Tisamenus was a descendant of Pelops, but the Heraclidæ derived from
Perseus. And they represented that Tyndareus had been turned out by
Hippocoon, and they said that Hercules had slain Hippocoon and his
sons, and had given the country back to Tyndareus. Similarly they said
about Messenia, that it was given to Nestor as a charge by Hercules
when he took Pylos. They turned out therefore Tisamenus from Lacedæmon
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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