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
There is also a hero-chapel to Hippothoon, from whom a tribe gets its
name, and near it one to Zarex, who is said to have learnt music of
Apollo. But my own idea is that Zarex was a stranger, a Lacedæmonian
who had come into Attica, and that the city Zarex in Laconia by the
sea was called after him. But if the hero Zarex was a native of
Attica, I know nothing about him. And the river Cephisus flows near
the Eleusinian territory with greater speed than before: and here
is a place called Erineus, where Pluto they say descended, when he
carried off Proserpine. On the banks of this river Theseus slew the
robber Polypemon, who was surnamed Procrustes. And the Eleusinians
have a temple to Triptolemus, and to Propylæan Artemis, and to Father
Poseidon, and a well called Callichorus, where the Eleusinian women
first danced and sang songs to the goddess. And the Rharian plain
was the first sown and the first that produced crops according to
tradition, and this is the reason why it is the custom to use barley
from it to make cakes for the sacrifices. Here is shown Triptolemus’
threshing-floor and altar. But what is inside the sacred wall I am
forbidden by a dream to divulge, for those who are uninitiated, as
they are forbidden sight of them, so also clearly may not hear of the
mysteries. And the hero Eleusis, from whom the city gets its name, was
according to some the son of Hermes and Daira the daughter of Oceanus,
others make him the son of Ogygus. For the ancients, when they had no
data for their pedigrees, invented fictitious ones, and especially in
the pedigrees of heroes.
And as you turn from Eleusis to Bœotia the boundary of Attica is
the Platæan district. That was the old boundary between the Athenians
and the people of Eleutheræ. But when the people of Eleutheræ became
Athenians then Mount Cithæron in Bœotia became the boundary. And the
people of Eleutheræ became Athenians not by compulsion, but from hatred
to the Thebans and a liking for the Athenian form of government. In
this plain too is a temple of Dionysus, and a statue of the god was
removed thence to Athens long ago: the one at Eleutheræ now is an
imitation of it. And at some distance is a small grotto, and near it a
spring of cold water. And it is said that Antiope gave birth to twins
and left them in this grotto, and a shepherd finding them near the
spring gave them their first bath in it, having stript them of their
swaddling clothes. And there was still in my day remains of a wall and
buildings at Eleutheræ. This makes it clear that it was a town built a
little above the plain towards Mount Cithæron.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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