[For, according to Sotades, Minerva enjoins Nestor to send his son with Telemachus in a chariot to Lacedæmon towards the east, while she herself returns back to the west, to pass the night in the vessel;
“but at sunrise she sets out to the magnanimous Caucones,”
to obtain payment of the debt, in a forward direction. How then are we to reconcile these opinions? for Nestor might say, “The Caucones are my subjects, and lie directly in the road of persons who are going to Lacedæmon; why then do you not accompany Telemachus and his friends on his journey, but take a road in an opposite direction?” Besides, it was natural for one, who was going to recover payment of a debt, and that a considerable sum, as she says, from a people under the command of Nestor, to request some assistance from him in case they should be so unjust, as usually happens, as to refuse to discharge it. But she did not do this.
If therefore the Caucones are to be found in one situation only, these absurdities would follow. But if one division of this tribe occupied the places in Elis near Dymē, Minerva might be said to direct her journey thither, and even the return to the ship would not be absurd, nor the separation from the company of Telemachus, when her road was in an opposite direction.
The question respecting Pylus may perhaps be resolved in a similar manner, when we come, as we proceed, to the description of the Messenian Pylus.[64]]
18. There is also, it is said, a nation, the Paroreatæ, who occupy, in the hilly district of Triphylia, the mountains, which extend from about Lepreum and Macistum to the sea near the Samian grove sacred to Neptune.
19. Below these people on the coast are two caves; one, of the nymphs Anigriades; the other, the scene of the adventures of the Atlantides,[65] and of the birth of Dardanus. There also are the groves, both the Ionæum and Eurycydeium.
Samicum is a fortress. Formerly there was a city of the name of Samos, which perhaps had its designation from its height, since they called heights Sami; perhaps also this was the acropolis of Arēnē, which the poet mentions in the Catalogue of the Ships;
“who inhabited Pylus, and the pleasant Arene;”[66]