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
Now the small townships of Attica, founded by haphazard, have the
following records. The Alimusii have a temple to Law-giving Demeter and
her daughter Proserpine; and in Zoster [_Belt_] by the sea is an altar
to Athene and Apollo and Artemis and Leto. They say that Leto did not
give birth to her children here, but loosed her belt as if she were
going to, and that was why the place got that name. The Prospaltii also
have a temple to Proserpine and Demeter, and the Anagyrasians have a
temple to the Mother of the Gods. And at Cephalæ Castor and Pollux are
held in highest honour: for they call them the Great Gods.
And the people of Prasiæ have a temple of Apollo: here came (they
say) the firstfruits of the Hyperboreans, handed over by them to the
Arimaspians, and by the Arimaspians to the Issedones, and brought
thence by the Scythians to Sinope, and thence carried by the Greeks to
Prasiæ, and by the Athenians to Delos: these firstfruits are hidden
in an ear of wheat, and may be looked at by nobody. At Prasiæ there
is also a monument to Erysichthon, who died on his passage home, as
he sailed back from Delos after his mission there. That Cranaus the
king of the Athenians was expelled by Amphictyon, though he was his
kinsman, I have before narrated: and they say that when he fled with
his adherents to the Lamprian township he was killed and buried there:
and his tomb is there to this day. And Ion the son of Xuthus, (for he
too dwelt in Attica, and commanded the Athenians in the war against
the Eleusinians,) has a tomb in the place called Potami.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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