(_d_) And though Timaeus makes great professions on this head, he
appears to me to be very far from arriving at the truth. Indeed, so far
from making accurate investigations of the truth through other people,
he does not tell us anything trustworthy even of events of which he has
been an eye-witness, or of places he has personally visited. This will
be made evident, if we can convict him of being ignorant, even in his
account of Sicily, of the facts which he brings forward. For it will
require very little further proof of his inaccuracy, if he can be shown
to be ill-informed and misled about the localities in which he was born
and bred, and that too the most famous of them. Now he asserts that
the fountain Arethusa at Syracuse has its source in the Peloponnese,
from the river Alpheus, which flows through Arcadia and Olympia. For
that this river sinks into the earth, and, after being carried for four
thousand stades under the Sicilian Sea, comes to the surface again in
Syracuse; and that this was proved from the fact that on a certain
occasion a storm of rain having come on during the Olympic festival,
and the river having flooded the sacred enclosure, a quantity of dung
from the animals used for sacrifice at the festival was thrown up by
the fountain Arethusa; as well as a certain gold cup, which was picked
up and recognised as being one of the ornaments used at the festival....
[Sidenote: The traditions of the colonisation of Locri Epizephyrii
agree with the account in Aristotle, rather than with that of Timaeus.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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