Description of Greece

​Wishing very eagerly to learn who the children of Polycaon by Messene were, I read the poem called the Eoeae and the Naupactia, and besides these all the genealogies of Cinaethon and Asios. However, they had composed nothing on this subject, though I know that the Great Eoeae says that Polycaon, the son of Butes, married Evaechme, daughter of Hyllus, son of Heracles; but what concerns the husband of Messene and Messene herself has been passed over by them.

​Some time later, when none of Polycaon’s descendants was left—about five generations having passed, in my opinion, and no more—they invited Perieres, the son of Aeolus, to be king. To him, as the Messenians say, came Melaneus, a man skilled in archery and for this reason believed to be a son of Apollo; and Perieres assigned him Carnasium, then called Oechalia, as a dwelling-place; and they say that the city got the name Oechalia from the wife of Melaneus.

​But the Thessalians and Euboeans—for indeed most things in Greece are disputed—say, the former that Eurytion (which is a deserted place in our time) was anciently a city and was called Oechalia, while in agreement with the Euboean account Creophylus has composed verses in his Heracleia; and Hecataeus of Miletus wrote that Oechalia is in Scium, a part of the Eretrian territory. However, the Messenians seem to me to speak more plausibly than those others on various grounds, and not least on account of the bones of Eurytus, which indeed my account will deal with in detail somewhere in what follows.

​To Perieres, by Gorgophone the daughter of Perseus, were born Aphareus and Leucippus, and when Perieres died, they took the rule of the Messenians; but Aphareus had the greater authority. Having become king, he founded the city Arene, named after the daughter of Oebalus, who was his own wife and also his uterine sister; for Gorgophone had also married Oebalus, and my account has already twice made clear what concerns her, both in the description of Argolis and in the Laconic history.

​At any rate, Aphareus founded the city Arene in Messenia, and received into his home Neleus, the son of Cretheus the son of Aeolus, but reputedly the son of Poseidon, who was his cousin and was fleeing from Iolcus from Pelias; and he gave him the coastal parts of the land, in which among other cities was Pylos, where Neleus dwelt and established his palace.

​Lycus, the son of Pandion, also came to Arene, when he himself was fleeing from Athens from his brother Aegeus; and he revealed the rites of the Great Goddesses to Aphareus and his children and his wife Arene; he revealed these to them by leading them to Andania, because Caucon also had initiated Messene there.

​Of the children of Aphareus, the elder and braver was Idas, while the younger was Lynceus, whom Pindar said—to anyone who finds it credible—had such sharp sight that he could see even through the trunk of an oak. Of Lynceus we do not know that any child was born, but Idas had a daughter Cleopatra by Marpessa, who married Meleager. But the author of the epic Cypria says that the wife of Protesilaus, who when the Greeks reached the Troad was the first who dared to disembark, this Protesilaus’ wife was named Polydora, and she was the daughter of Meleager, the son of Oeneus. If therefore this is true, these women, three in number, starting from Marpessa, all slaughtered themselves upon the prior deaths of their husbands.