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
By the return of the Heraclidæ all the Peloponnese was disturbed
except Arcadia, for many of the cities had to take Dorian settlers,
and frequent changes of inhabitants took place. The following were
the changes at Phlius. Rhegnidas a Dorian (the son of Phalces the son
of Temenus) marched against it from Argos and Sicyon. And some of the
Phliasians were content with his demands, that they should remain in
their own land, that he should be their king, and that the Dorians and
he should have lands assigned to them. But Hippasus and his party stood
out for a vigorous defence, and not for yielding up to the Dorians
their numerous advantages without a fight. But as the people preferred
the opposite view, Hippasus and those who agreed with him fled to
Samos. And the great grandson of this Hippasus was Pythagoras, surnamed
the Wise: who was the son of Mnesarchus, the son of Euphron, the son of
Hippasus. This is the account the Phliasians give of their own history,
and in most particulars the Sicyonians bear them out.
The most notable public sights are as follows. There is in the
citadel at Phlius a cypress grove, and a temple hoary from old
antiquity. The deity to whom the temple belongs is said by the most
ancient of the Phliasians to have been Ganymeda, but by later ones
Hebe: of whom Homer has made mention in the single combat between
Menelaus and Paris, saying that she was the cupbearer of the gods, and
again in the descent of Odysseus to Hades he has said that she was
the wife of Hercules. But Olen in his Hymn to Hera says that she was
reared by the Seasons, and was mother of Ares and Hebe. And among the
Phliasians this goddess has various honours and especially in regard to
slaves; for they give them entire immunity if they come as suppliants
here, and when prisoners are loosed of their fetters they hang them up
on the trees in the grove. And they keep a yearly feast which they
call _Ivy-cuttings_. But they have no statue in any secret crypt, nor
do they display one openly: and they have a sacred reason for acting
so, for on the left as you go out there is a temple of Hera with a
statue in Parian marble. And in the citadel there are some precincts
sacred to Demeter, and in them a temple and statue of Demeter and
Persephone, and also a brazen statue of Artemis, which seemed to me
ancient. And as you go down from the citadel there is on the right
a temple and beardless statue of Æsculapius. Under this temple is a
theatre. And not far from it is a temple of Demeter, and some old
statues of the goddess in a sitting posture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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