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The following story is told by the Arcadians. When Rhea had given birth to Poseidon, she laid him in a flock for him to live there with the lambs, and the spring too received its name just because the lambs pastured around it. Rhea, it is said, declared to Cronus that she had given birth to a horse, and gave him a foal to swallow instead of the child, just as later she gave him in place of Zeus a stone wrapped up in swaddling clothes.
8.8.3When I began to write my history I was inclined to count these legends as foolishness, but on getting as far as
The city of the Mantineans is about twelve stades farther away from this spring. Now there are plain indications that it was in another place that Mantineus the son of Lycaon founded his city, which even to-day is called Ptolis (City) by the Arcadians. From here, in obedience to an oracle,
If we may base a conjecture on the verses of Homer, we are led to believe that this snake was a dragon. When in the list of ships he tells how the Greeks abandoned Philoctetes in
The Mantineans did not fight on the side of the other Arcadians against the Lacedaemonians at Dipaea, but in the Peloponnesian war they rose with the Eleans against the Lacedaemonians, note and joined in battle with them after the arrival of reinforcements from
Later on a Lacedaemonian army under Agesipolis, the son of Pausanias, invaded their territory. Agesipolis was victorious in the battle and shut up the Mantineans within their walls, capturing the city shortly after. He did not take it by storm, but turned the river Ophis against its fortifications, which were made of unburnt brick.
8.8.8Now against the blows of engines brick brings greater security than fortifications built of stone. For stones break and are dislodged from their fittings; brick, however, does not suffer so much from engines, but it crumbles under the action of water just as wax is melted by the sun.
8.8.9This method of demolishing the fortifications of the Mantineans was not discovered by Agesipolis. It was a stratagem invented at an earlier date by Cimon, the son of Miltiades, when he was besieging
Fate decreed that the Thebans should restore the Mantineans from the villages to their own country after the engagement at Leuctra, note but when restored they proved far from grateful. They were caught treating with the Lacedaemonians and intriguing for a peace with them privately without reference to the rest of the Arcadian people. So through their fear of the Thebans they openly changed sides and joined the Lacedaemonian confederacy, and when the battle took place at
Subsequently the Mantineans quarrelled with the Lacedaemonians, and seceded from them to the Achaean League. They defeated Agis, the son of Eudamidas, king of
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