Greek Texts & Translations

Maenalia is storm-swept, where lies
Arcas, from whom all Arcadians are named,
In a place where meet three, four, even five roads;
Thither I bid you go, and with kind heart
Take up Arcas and bring him back to your lovely city.
There make Arcas a precinct and sacrifices.
This place, where the grave of Arcas is, they call Altars of the Sun.

Not far from the theater are famous tombs, one called Common Hearth, round in shape, where, they told me, lies Antinoe, the daughter of Cepheus. On it stands a slab, on which is carved in relief a horseman, Grylus, the son of Xenophon.

Behind the theater I found the remains, with an image, of a temple of Aphrodite surnamed Ally. The inscription on the pedestal announced that the image was dedicated by Nicippe, the daughter of Paseas. This sanctuary was made by the Mantineans to remind posterity of their fighting on the side of the Romans at the battle of Actium. They also worship Athena Alea, of whom they have a sanctuary and an image.

Antinous too was deified by them; his temple is the newest in Mantineia. He was a great favorite of the Emperor Hadrian. I never saw him in the flesh, but I have seen images and pictures of him. He has honors in other places also, and on the Nile is an Egyptian city named after Antinous. He has won worship in Mantineia for the following reason. Antinous was by birth from Bithynium beyond the river Sangarius, and the Bithynians are by descent Arcadians of Mantineia.

For this reason the Emperor established his worship in Mantineia also; mystic rites are celebrated in his honor each year, and games every four years. There is a building in the gymnasium of Mantineia containing statues of Antinous, and remarkable for the stones with which it is adorned, and especially so for its pictures. Most of them are portraits of Antinous, who is made to look just like Dionysus. There is also a copy here of the painting in the Cerameicus which represented the engagement of the Athenians at Mantineia.

In the market-place is a bronze portrait-statue of a woman, said by the Mantineans to be Diomeneia, the daughter of Arcas, and a hero-shrine of Podares, who was killed, they say, in the battle with the Thebaus under Epaminondas. Three generations ago they changed the inscription on the grave and made it apply to a descendant of this Podares with the same name, who was born late enough to have Roman citizenship.

In my time the elder Podares was honored by the Mantineans, who said that he who proved the bravest in the battle, of themselves and of their allies, was Grylus, the son of Xenophon; next to Grylus was Cephisodorus of Marathon, who at the time commanded the Athenian horse. The third place for valor they give to Podares.

By the foot of the mountain is the sanctuary of Horse Poseidon, not more than six stades distant from Mantineia. About this sanctuary I, like everyone else who has mentioned it, can write only what I have heard. The modern sanctuary was built by the Emperor Hadrian, who set overseers over the workmen, so that nobody might look into the old sanctuary, and none of the ruins be removed. He ordered them to build around the new temple. Originally, they say, this sanctuary was built for Poseidon by Agamedes and Trophonius, ^note who worked oak logs and fitted them together.

They set up no barrier at the entrance to prevent men going inside; but they stretched across it a thread of wool. Perhaps they thought that even this would strike fear into the religious people of that time, and perhaps there was also some power in the thread. It is notorious that even Aepytus, the son of Hippothous, entered the sanctuary neither by jumping over the thread nor by slipping under it, but by cutting it through. For this sin he was blinded by a wave that dashed on to his eyes, and forthwith his life left him.

There is an old legend that a wave of sea-water rises up in the sanctuary. A like story is told by the Athenians about the wave on the Acropolis, and by the Carians living in Mylasa about the sanctuary of the god called in the native tongue Osogoa. But the sea at Phalerum is about twenty stades distant from Athens, and the port of Mylasa is eighty stades from the city. But at Mantineia the sea rises after a very long distance, and quite plainly through the divine will.