On the eastern part of the mountain is a temple of Parrhasian Apollo, also called Pythian Apollo. During the annual festival of the god they sacrifice in the market-place a boar to Apollo the Helper, and after the sacrifice they convey the victim to the temple of Parrhasian Apollo with fluteplaying and solemn procession, and cut off the thighs and burn them, and consume the flesh of the victim on the spot. Such is their annual custom. And on the north side of Mount Lycæus is the district of Thisoa: the men who live here hold the Nymph Thisoa in highest honour. Through this district several streams flow that fall into the Alpheus, as Mylaon and Nus and Achelous and Celadus and Naliphus. There are two other rivers of the same name but far greater fame than this Achelous in Arcadia, one that flows through Acarnania and Ætolia till it reaches the islands of the Echinades, which Homer has called in the Iliad the king of all rivers,[41] the other the Achelous flowing from Mount Sipylus, which river and mountain he has associated with the legend of Niobe.[42] The third Achelous is this one on Mount Lycæus. To the right of Lycosura are the hills called Nomia, on which is a temple of Pan Nomius on a spot called Melpea, so called they say from the piping of Pan there. The simplest explanation why the hills were called Nomia is that Pan had his pastures there, but the Arcadians say they were called after a Nymph of that name. CHAPTER XXXIX. Past Lycosura in a westerly direction flows the river Plataniston, which everyone must cross who is going to Phigalia, after which an ascent of 30 stades or a little more takes you to that town. How Phigalus was the son of Lycaon, and how he was the original founder of the town, and how in process of time the name of the town got changed into Phialia from Phialus the son of Bucolion, and afterwards got back its old name, all this I have entered into already. There are other traditions not worthy of credit, as that Phigalus was an Autochthon and not the son of Lycaon, and some say that Phigalia was one of the Nymphs called Dryads. When the Lacedæmonians attacked Arcadia and invaded Phigalia, they defeated the inhabitants in a battle and laid siege to the town, and as the town was nearly taken by storm the Phigalians evacuated it, or the Lacedæmonians allowed them to leave it upon conditions of war. And the capture of Phigalia and the flight of the Phigalians from it took place when Miltiades was chief magistrate at Athens, in the 2nd year of the 30th Olympiad, in which Chionis the Laconian was victor for the third time. And it seemed good to those Phigalians who had escaped to go to Delphi, and inquire of the god as to their return. And the Pythian Priestess told them that if they tried by themselves to return to Phigalia she foresaw no hope of their return, but if they took a hundred picked men from Oresthasium, and they were slain in battle, the Phigalians would get their return through them.