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 as you go a little further is the grove of the hero Lacius, who
gives his name to a township. There too is the tomb of Nicocles of
Tarentum, who won the greatest fame of all harpers. There is also an
altar to Zephyrus, and a temple of Demeter and Proserpine: Athene and
Poseidon have joint honours with them. Here they say Phytalus received
Demeter into his house, and the goddess gave him in return a fig tree.
My account is confirmed by the inscription on Phytalus’ tomb.
“Here Phytalus king-hero once received
Holy Demeter, when she first vouchsafed
The fruit that mortals call the fig: since when
The race of Phytalus has deathless fame.”
And before crossing over the river Cephisus, is the tomb of
Theodorus, one of the best tragic actors of his day. And there are two
statues near the river, Mnesimaches, and his son cutting off his hair
as a votive offering to the Cephisus. That it was an ancient custom for
all the Greeks to cut off locks of their hair to rivers one would infer
from the verses of Homer, who describes Peleus as vowing to cut off
his hair to the river Spercheus if his son Achilles returned safe from
Troy.[10]
On the other side of the Cephisus is an ancient altar to Milichian
(_i.e._ _mild_) Zeus, where Theseus got purified after slaying the
progeny of Phytalus. He had slain other robbers, and Sinis, who was his
relation by Pittheus his maternal grandfather. And there are the tombs
here of Theodectes the son of Phaselites, and of Mnesitheus. This last
they say was a noted doctor, and dedicated several statues, and among
them one of Iacchus. And by the roadside is a small temple called the
temple of Cyamites (_Bean-man_): but I have no certain information,
whether he first sowed beans, or whether they gave the name to some
hero, because it was not lawful to ascribe the invention of beans to
Demeter. And whoever has seen the Eleusinian mysteries, or has read the
Orphic poems, knows what I mean. And of the tombs that are finest for
size and beauty are two especially, one of a Rhodian who had migrated
to Athens, the other of Pythionice, made by Harpalus a Macedonian, who
had fled from Alexander and sailed to Europe from Asia, and coming
to Athens was arrested by the Athenians, but escaped by bribing
the friends of Alexander and others, and before this had married
Pythionice, whose extraction I don’t know, but she was a courtesan both
at Athens and Corinth. He was so enamoured of her that, when she died,
he raised this monument to her, the finest of all the ancient works of
art in Greece.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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