Pausanias, Description of Greece (English) (XML Header) [genre: prose] [word count] [lemma count] [Paus.]. | ||
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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 The city is no less adorned than the most prosperous of the Greek cities, and it is separated from the grove of Trophonius by the river Hercyna. They say that here Hercyna, when playing with the Maid, the daughter of Demeter, held a goose which against her will she let loose. The bird flew into a hollow cave and hid under a stone; the Maid entered and took the bird as it lay under the stone. The water flowed, they say, from the place where the Maid took up the stone, and hence the river received the name of Hercyna.
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