Pausanias, Description of Greece (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Paus.]. | ||
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They have also a fountain worth seeing, and go down to it to fetch water. The treasury of Minyas, a wonder second to none either in
There are graves of Minyas and Hesiod. They say that they thus recovered the bones of Hesiod. A pestilence fell on men and beasts, so that they sent envoys to the god. To these, it is said, the Pythian priestess made answer that to bring the bones of Hesiod from the land of
So when the envoys landed, they saw, it is said, a rock not far from the road, with the bird upon the rock; the bones of Hesiod they found in a cleft of the rock. Elegiac verses are inscribed on the tomb:—
Ascra rich in corn was his native land, but when Hesiod died,
The land of the horse-striking Minyans holds his bones,
Whose fame will rise very high in
When men are judged by the touchstone of artistry.
About Actaeon the Orchomenians had the following story. A ghost, they say, carrying a rock note was ravaging the land. When they inquired at
Seven stades from
The Thebans declare that the river Cephisus was diverted into the Orchomenian plain by Heracles, and that for a time it passed under the mountain and entered the sea, until Heracles blocked up the chasm through the mountain. Now Homer too knows that the Cephisian Lake was a lake of itself, and not made by Heracles. Wherefore Homer says:—
Sloping towards the Cephisian Lake.
Hom. Il. 5.709
It is not likely either that the Orchomenians would not have discovered the chasm, and, breaking down the work put up by Heracles, have given back to the Gephisus its ancient passage, since right down to the Trojan war they were a wealthy people. There is evidence in my favour in the passage of Homer where Achilles replies to the envoys from Agamemnon:—
Not even the wealth that comes to
Hom. Il. 9.381a line that clearly shows that even then the revenues coming to
They say that
To Poseidon and glorious Mideia
Chersias of
Was born
The poem of Chersias was no longer extant in my day, but these verses are quoted by Callippus in the same history of
ch. 39
9.39.1
On the side towards the mountains the boundary of Orchomenus is
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