Pausanias' description of Greece, Volume II.Pausanias, active approximately 150-175
History
Pausanias' description of Greece, Volume II.
Pausanias, active approximately 150-175
Greece -- Antiquities; Greece -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800
Next to the temple of Poseidon you will come to a place full of oak
trees called Pelagos; there is a road from Mantinea to Tegea through
these oak trees. And the boundary between the districts of Mantinea
and Tegea is the round altar on the highroad. And if you should turn
to the left from the temple of Poseidon, in about five stades you will
come to the tombs of the daughters of Pelias. The people of Mantinea
say they dwelt here to avoid the vituperations which came upon them
for the death of their father. For as soon as Medea came to Iolcos she
forthwith plotted against Pelias, really working for Jason’s interest,
while ostensibly hostile to him. She told the daughters of Pelias
that, if they liked, she could make their father a young man instead
of an old man. So she slew a ram and boiled his flesh with herbs in a
caldron, and she brought the old ram out of the caldron in the shape
of a young man alive. After this she took Pelias to boil and cut him
up, but his daughters got hardly enough of him to take to burial. This
compelled them to go and live in Arcadia, and when they died their
sepulchres were raised here. No poet has given their names so far as I
know, but Mico the painter has written under their portraits the names
Asteropea and Antinoe.
And the place called Phœzon is about 20 stades from these tombs, where
is a tomb with a stone base, rising up somewhat from the ground.
The road is very narrow at this place, and they say it is the tomb
of Areithous, who was called Corynetes from the club which he used
in battle. As you go about 30 stades along the road from Mantinea
to Pallantium, the oak plantation called Pelagos extends along the
highroad, and here the cavalry of the Mantineans and Athenians fought
against the Bœotian cavalry. And the Mantineans say that Epaminondas
was killed here by Machærion a Mantinean, but the Lacedæmonians say
that the Machærion who killed Epaminondas was a Spartan. But the
Athenian account, corroborated by the Thebans, is that Epaminondas was
mortally wounded by Gryllus: and this corresponds with the painting of
the action at Mantinea. The Mantineans also seem to have given Gryllus
a public funeral, and erected to him his statue on a pillar where he
fell as the bravest man in the allied army: whereas Machærion, though
the Lacedæmonians mention him, had no special honours paid to him as a
brave man, either at Sparta or at Mantinea. And when Epaminondas was
wounded they removed him yet alive out of the line of battle. And for a
time he kept his hand on his wound, and gasped for breath, and looked
earnestly at the fight, and the place where he kept so looking they
called ever after Scope, (_Watch_), but when the battle was over then
he took his hand from the wound and expired, and they buried him on the
field of battle. And there is a pillar on his tomb, and a shield above
it with a dragon as its device. The dragon is intended to intimate that
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