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
the contests at Olympia, if they had excluded the people of Elis from
the Isthmian games? But the other tradition states that Prolaus, a man
of much repute among the people of Elis, and Lysippe his wife had two
sons Philanthus and Lampus, and they went to the Isthmian games, the
one intending to compete in the pancratium among the boys, the other
in wrestling, and before the games came on they were strangled or
killed in some way by their rivals: and that was why Lysippe imposed
her curses on the people of Elis, if they would not of their own accord
cease to attend the Isthmian games. This tradition too is easily shewn
to be a silly one. For Timon a native of Elis had victories in the
pentathlum in all the other Greek contests, and there is an effigy of
him at Olympia, and some elegiac verses which enumerate the various
crowns that he carried off as victor, and the reason why he did not
participate in the Isthmian contest. This is one couplet. “Our hero was
prevented coming to the land of Sisyphus by the strife that arose in
consequence of the sad fate of the sons of Molione.”
CHAPTER III.
Let this suffice on the matter. To resume, Hercules afterwards captured
and sacked Elis, having got together an army of Argives Thebans and
Arcadians: and the people of Elis were assisted by the men of Pylos
in Elis and by the men of Pisa. And the men of Pylos were punished by
Hercules, and he intended marching against Pisa, but was stopped by the
following oracle from Delphi,
“Dear to the Father is Pisa, Pytho has entrusted it to me.”
This oracle was the salvation of Pisa. And to Phyleus Hercules gave
up Elis and other places, not so much willingly as standing in awe of
Phyleus, to whom he also granted the captives and forgave Augeas. And
the women of Elis, as their land was stripped of young men through
the war, are said to have prayed to Athene that they might conceive
directly they married, and their prayer was granted, and they erected
a temple to Athene under the title of Mother. And both the women and
men being excessively delighted with their union called the place where
they first met Bady (_sweet_), and also gave the same name in their
national dialect to the river flowing there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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