Geography

​Cyme is the largest and best of the Aeolian cities, and this city and Lesbos are, so to speak, the metropolises of the other cities, which are about thirty in number, of which not a few have disappeared. Cyme is ridiculed for its senselessness according to some such reputation, as some say, namely because they farmed out the harbor tolls three hundred years after the foundation, and before that the people did not enjoy this revenue; thus a reputation prevailed as if they had only late realized that they inhabited a city by the sea. There is also another story, that having borrowed money publicly they mortgaged their colonnades, and then, not paying it back by the appointed day, they were barred from their walks; however, whenever it rained, out of some sense of shame the lenders would have it proclaimed, bidding them to go under the colonnades; and since the herald cried out thus, “Go under the colonnades,” a story spread abroad that the Cymaeans did not realize that they had to go under the colonnades during rains, unless someone indicated it to them by herald. A man worthy of memory from this city is indisputably Ephorus, one of the disciples of the orator Isocrates, who wrote the History and the work On Inventions; and even earlier than him, Hesiod the poet, for he himself has said that his father Dios migrated to Boeotia, leaving behind Aeolian Cyme: “And he settled near Helicon in a wretched village, Ascra, bad in winter, painful in summer, never good.” Homer is not agreed upon, for many dispute his origin. And they say that the name was given to the city after an Amazon, just as Myrina was named after the one who lies in the Trojan plain under Batieia: “Which indeed men call Batieia, but the immortals the tomb of bounds-abounding Myrina.” And Ephorus too is ridiculed, because, having no deeds of his native city to relate in his enumeration of other transactions, and yet not wishing her to be unmentioned, he adds this concluding remark: “And at the same time, the Cymaeans remained quiet.” Since we have gone through the Trojan and at the same time the Aeolian coast, next would be to traverse the inland country as far as the Taurus, keeping the same order of approach.