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
And near one another are temples of Apollo, and Artemis, and Dionysus.
The wooden statue of Apollo is naked and of native art, but Artemis
and Dionysus are draped, and Dionysus is represented with a beard. But
the temple of Æsculapius is on the other side and not here, and the
statue of stone, seated. And of all the gods the people of Ægina honour
Hecate most, and celebrate her rites annually, saying that Orpheus the
Thracian introduced those rites. And within the precincts is a temple,
containing a wooden statue of Hecate by Myron, with only one head and
one body. Alcamenes as it seems to me was the first who made the statue
of Hecate with three heads and three bodies which the Athenians call
Hecate Epipurgidia: it stands near the temple of Wingless Victory.
And in Ægina as you go to the mountain of Pan-Hellenian Zeus is the
temple of Aphæa, about whom Pindar wrote an ode for the Æginetans. And
the Cretans say, (for her worship is indigenous among them too), that
Eubulus was the son of that Carmanor who purged Apollo of the murder
of Python, and that Britomartis was the daughter of Zeus by Carme the
daughter of Eubulus: and that she rejoiced in races and hunting, and
was a very great friend of Artemis. And fleeing from Minos, who was
enamoured of her, she threw herself into some nets set for catching
fish. Artemis made her a goddess, and she is worshipped not only by
the Cretans but also by the Æginetans, who say that Britomartis was
seen in their island. And she is called Aphæa in Ægina, but Dictynna
in Crete. And the mountain Pan-Hellenium has nothing of note but the
temple of Zeus, which they say Æacus erected. As to what concerns
Auxesia and Lamia, how there was no rain at Epidaurus, and how after
receiving olive trees from Athens they made wooden statues according to
the bidding of the oracle, and how the Epidaurians did not pay to the
Athenians their charge for the Æginetans having these statues, and how
the Athenians who crossed over to Ægina to exact payment perished, all
this has been told accurately and circumstantially by Herodotus. I do
not therefore care to write again what has been so well told before,
but this much I may say that I have seen the statues and sacrificed to
them as they are accustomed to sacrifice at Eleusis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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