Greek Texts & Translations

A little farther on is a high mound of earth, the grave of the suitors of Hippodameia. Now Oenomaus, they say, laid them in the ground near one another with no token of respect. But afterwards Pelops raised a high monument to them all, to honor them and to please Hippodamaeia. I think too that Pelops wanted a memorial to tell posterity the number and character of the men vanquished by Oenomaus before Pelops himself conquered him.

According to the epic poem called the Great Eoeae
the next after Marmax to be killed by Oenomaus was Alcathus, son of Porthaon; after Alcathus came Euryalus, Eurymachus and Crotalus. Now the parents and fatherlands of these I was unable to discover, but Acrias, the next after them to be killed, one might guess to have been a Lacedaemonian and the founder of Acriae. After Acrias they say that Oenomaus slew Capetus, Lycurgus, Lasius, Chalcodon and Tricolonus, who, according to the Arcadians, was the descendant and namesake of Tricolonus, the son of Lycaon.

After Tricolonus there met their fate in the race Aristomachus and Prias, and then Pelagon, Aeolius and Cronius. Some add to the aforesaid Erythras, the son of Leucon, the son of Athamas, after whom was named Erythrae in Boeotia, and Eioneus, the son of Magnes the son of Aeolus. These are the men whose monument is here, and Pelops, they say, sacrificed every year to them as heroes, when he had won the sovereignty of Pisa.

The founder of the city, they say, was Pisus, the son of Perieres, the son of Aeolus. The people of Pisa brought of themselves disaster on their own heads by their hostility to the Eleans, and by their keenness to preside over the Olympic games instead of them. At the eighth Festival ^note they brought in Pheidon of Argos, the most overbearing of the Greek tyrants, and held the games along with him, while at the thirty-fourth Festival ^note the people of Pisa, with their king Pantaleon the son of Omphalion, collected an army from the neighborhood, and held the Olympic games instead of the Eleans.

These Festivals, as well as the hundred and fourth ^note, which was held by the Arcadians, are called “Non-Olympiads” by the Eleans, who do not include them in a list of Olympiads. At the forty-eighth Festival ^note, Damophon the son of Pantaleon gave the Eleans reasons for suspecting that he was intriguing against them, but when they invaded the land of Pisa with an army he persuaded them by prayers and oaths to return quietly home again.

When Pyrrhus, the son of Pantaleon, succeeded his brother Damophon as king, the people of Pisa of their own accord made war against Elis, and were joined in their revolt from the Eleans by the people of Macistus and Scillus, which are in Triphylia, and by the people of Dyspontium, another vassal community. The list were closely related to the people of Pisa, and it was a tradition of theirs that their founder had been Dysponteus the son of Oenomaus. It was the fate of Pisa, and of all her allies, to be destroyed by the Eleans.

Of Pylus in the land of' Elis the ruins are to be seen on the mountain road from Olympia to Elis, the distance between Elis and Pylus being eighty stades. This Pylus was founded, as I have already said, ^note by a Megarian called Pylon, the son of Cleson. Destroyed by Heracles and refounded by the Eleans, the city was doomed in time to be without inhabitants. Beside it the river Ladon flows into the Peneius.

The Eleans declare that there is a reference to this Pylus in the passage of Homer: And he was descended from the river
Alpheius, that in broad stream flows through the land of the Pylians.
Hom. Il. 5.544

The Eleans convinced me that they are right. For the Alpheius does flow through this district, and the passage cannot refer to another Pylus. For the land of the Pylians over against the island Sphacteria simply cannot in the nature of things be crossed by the Alpheius, and, moreover, we know of no city in Arcadia named Pylus.