Description of Greece

​Mothone, which was called Pedasus before the army was assembled for Troy and during the war against Ilium, later changed its name, as the Mothonaeans themselves say, after the daughter of Oeneus. For they say that to Oeneus, the son of Porthaon, who after the capture of Ilium withdrew to the Peloponnese to Diomedes, a daughter Mothone was born of a concubine. But in my opinion, the stone Mothon gave the name to the place. And this is also what makes the harbor for them; for extending as a reef, it makes the entrance narrower for ships, and at the same time stands as a barrier so that the wave is not stirred up from the deep.

​I have also shown in my earlier accounts that the Lacedaemonians gave Mothone to the Nauplians when they were expelled on the charge of Laconian sympathies while Damocratidas was king in Argos, and how even after the restoration of the Messenians no harm came to them. The Nauplians were, in my opinion, Egyptians in ancient times, and having arrived with Danaus by ships in Argolis, they were settled three generations later in Nauplia by Nauplius, the son of Amymone.

​To the Mothonaeans, the Emperor Trajan granted that they should govern themselves in autonomy as a free people; but in still older times, they alone of the Messenians on the coast had the misfortune to experience the following disaster. The affairs of Epirus in Thesprotia were ruined by anarchy; for Deidameia, the daughter of Pyrrhus, had no children, and when she was about to die, she entrusted the government to the people. She was the daughter of Pyrrhus, son of Ptolemy, son of Alexander, son of Pyrrhus.

​The matters concerning Pyrrhus, the son of Aeacus, I have already shown before in my account of the Athenians; but Procles the Carthaginian, on account of good fortune and the brilliance of his deeds, assigned more to Alexander, the son of Philip, yet asserted that Pyrrhus was superior in drawing up infantry and cavalry and in inventing stratagems against enemy forces.

​When the Epirotes ceased to be ruled by kings, the people became insolent in other matters and neglected to obey those in authority; and the Illyrians, who dwelt above the part of Epirus near the Ionian Sea, subdued them by a sudden incursion. For we do not yet know of any others than the Athenians who made democracy flourish, and the Athenians were raised to great heights by it; for in their native intelligence they surpassed the Greek world, and disobeyed established laws least of all.

​The Illyrians, having tasted power and always desiring more, built ships and plundered others as they happened to meet them, and having put in at the territory of Mothone, anchored as if in a friendly country. They sent a messenger to the city and requested them to bring wine to their ships. When a few men arrived bringing it, they bought the wine at the price the Mothonaeans set, and themselves sold to them some of the goods they brought.