Pausanias' description of Greece, Volume I.

by active approximately 150-175 Pausanias

CHAPTER XXVI.

From Œtylus to Thalamæ the distance by road is about 80 stades, and by the roadside is a temple and oracle of Ino. They get their oracular responses asleep, for whatever they want to know the goddess shews them in dreams. And there are two brazen statues in the open air part of the temple, one of Pasiphae, and one of the Sun. What the statue in the temple is made of is not easy to see from the quantity of the garlands, but they say that it too is of brass. And fresh water flows from a sacred fount, called the water of the Moon. Pasiphae indeed is not the indigenous goddess of the people of Thalamæ.

And about twenty stades from Thalamæ is a place called Pephnos, by the sea. There is a little island in front of it not greater than a big rock, which is also called Pephnos, and the people of Thalamæ say that it was the birthplace of Castor and Pollux. Alcman also gives us the same account I know in one of his poems. But they do not say that they were brought up at Pephnos, for Hermes took them to Pellana. And in this island there are brazen statues of Castor and Pollux about a foot high in the open air. These the sea cannot move from their position, though in winter time it dashes violently over the rock. This is indeed wonderful, and the ants there are whiter in colour than ants generally. The Messenians say that the island originally belonged to them, so that they claim Castor and Pollux as theirs rather than as deities of the Lacedæmonians.

About twenty stades from Pephnos is Leuctra. Why it was so called I do not know: but if it was from Leucippus the son of Perieres, as the Messenians say, this will be why they honour Æsculapius here most of all the gods, as the son of Arsinoe the daughter of Leucippus. And there is a statue of Æsculapius in stone, and one of Ino in another part of the town. There is also a temple and statue of Cassandra the daughter of Priam, who is called Alexandra by the people of Leuctra: and there are some wooden statues of Carnean Apollo, who is worshipped in the same way as by the Lacedæmonians at Sparta. And in the citadel there is a temple and statue of Athene. And there is a temple and grove of Eros, and in winter-time water flows through the grove: but the leaves that fall from the trees in autumn could never be carried away by the water even if it were very plentiful. But what I know happened in my time at a part of Leuctra near the sea, I will now relate. The wind fanned a fire in the wood so that it burnt down most of the trees: and when the spot became bare, there was a statue of Ithomatan Zeus discovered which had been erected there. The Messenians say that this is a proof that Leuctra was originally part of Messenia. But Ithomatan Zeus might have received honours from the Lacedæmonians as well, if they originally lived at Leuctra.

And Cardamyle, which Homer[50] has mentioned in the promises of gifts made by Agamemnon, is subject to Sparta, as the Emperor Augustus detached it from Messenia. It is eight stades from the sea, and sixty from Leuctra. And not far from the seashore is a grove sacred to the daughters of Nereus, for the story goes that they climbed up to this place from the sea to see Pyrrhus the son of Achilles, when he went off to Sparta to marry Hermione. In this small town there is a temple of Athene and Carnean Apollo, whom they worship according to the Dorian fashion.

And the city called, by Homer[51] Enope, the inhabitants of which are Messenians though they join the Council of the Eleutherolacones, is called in our time Gerenia. Some say Nestor was brought up in this city, others that he fled here when Pylos was taken by Hercules. Gerenia contains the tomb and temple of Machaon the son of Æsculapius: from whom men may have possibly learnt the healing of diseases. The sacred place they call Rhodon, and the statue of Machaon is erect in brass. And on its head is a garland, which the Messenians call ciphos[52] in their country’s tongue. The writer of the epic poem called the Little Iliad says that Machaon was killed by Eurypylus the son of Telephus. That is why (as I myself know) in the rites in the temple of Æsculapius at Pergamum, they begin with the Hymns of Telephus, but make no reference in their singing to Eurypylus, nor will they name him at all in the temple, because they know he was the murderer of Machaon. And the tradition is that Nestor recovered the bones of Machaon. And Podalirius, when the Greeks were returning after the sack of Ilium, was carried they say out of his way to Syrnum a place in the Continent of Caria, and getting there safe built a town there.

In the Gerenian district is the mountain Calathium, and on it is a temple of Clæa and a grotto near the temple, with a narrow entrance: within there are several objects worth seeing. And from Gerenia to Alagonia in the interior is about 30 stades, but that town I have already mentioned amongst the Eleutherolacones. And the sights best worth seeing there are the temples of Dionysus and Artemis.