Pausanias, Description of Greece (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Paus.]. | ||
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In days of old, men made wooden images, so far as I have been able to discover, from the following trees ebony, cypress, cedar, oak, yew, lotus. But the image of Cyllenian Hermes is made of none of these, but of juniper wood. Its height, I conjecture, is about eight feet.
8.17.3Cyllene can show also the following marvel. On it the blackbirds are entirely white. The birds so called by the Boeotians are a somewhat different breed, which does not sing. Eagles called swan-eagles, very like to swans for whiteness, I am acquainted with, as I have seen them on Mount Sipylus round the lake called the Lake of Tantalus. White wild boars and Thracian white bears have been known to be acquired by private individuals.
8.17.4White hares are bred in
Adjoining Cyllene is another mountain, Chelydorea, note where Hermes is said to have found a tortoise, taken the shell from the beast, and to have made therefrom a harp. Here is the boundary between Pheneus and
As you go from Pheneus to the west, the left road leads to the city Cleitor, while on the right is the road to Nonacris and the water of the Styx. Of old Nonacris was a town of the Arcadians that was named after the wife of Lycaon. When I visited it, it was in ruins, and most of these were hidden. Not far from the ruins is a high cliff; I know of none other that rises to so great a height. A water trickles down the cliff, called by the Greeks the water of the Styx.
ch. 18
8.18.1
Hesiod in the Theogony Epimenides of He also represents the Styx as a river in Hades, and Athena says that Zeus does not remember that because of her he kept Heracles safe throughout the labours imposed by Eurystheus. The water trickling down the cliff by the side of Nonacris falls first to a high rock, through which it passes and then descends into the river Crathis. Its water brings death to all, man and beast alike. It is said too that it once brought death even upon goats, which drank of the water first; later on all the wonderful properties of the water were learnt. For glass, crystal, murrhine vessels, other articles men make of stone, and pottery, are all broken by the water of the Styx, while things of horn or of bone, with iron, bronze, lead, tin, silver and electrum, are all corroded by this water. Gold too suffers just like all the other metals, and yet gold is immune to rust, as the Lesbian poetess bears witness and is shown by the metal itself. So heaven has assigned to the most lowly things the mastery over things far more esteemed than they. For pearls are dissolved by vinegar, while diamonds, the hardest of stones, are melted by the blood of the he-goat. The only thing that can resist the water of the Styx is a horse's hoof. When poured into it the water is retained, and does not break up the hoof. Whether Alexander, the son of Philip, met his end by this poison I do not know for certain, but I do know that there is a story to this effect.
Above Nonacris are the Aroanian Mountains, in which is a cave. To this cave, legend says, the daughters of Proetus fled when struck with madness; Melampus by secret sacrifices and purifications brought them down to a place called
note —for there are some who assign this hexameter poem to Hesiod—speaks of Styx as the daughter of Ocean and the wife of Pallas. Men say that Linus too gives a like account in his verses, though when I read these they struck me as altogether spurious.
Witness now to this be Earth, and broad Heaven above,
Hom. Il. 15.36-37These verses suggest that the poet had seen the water of the Styx trickling down. Again in the list of those who came with Guneus note he makes the river Titaresius receive its water from the Styx.
And the water of Styx down-flowing.
For if I had known this in my shrewd heart
Homer, unknown location.
When he sent him to Hades the gate-keeper,
To fetch out of Erebus the hound of hateful Hades,
He would never have escaped the sheer streams of' the river Styx.
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