Description of Greece

​Let these matters be explained by us to this extent. Among these dedications, there is also Phormis himself standing against an enemy man, and next he fights with a second, and again with a third. It is written upon them that the fighting soldier is Phormis the Maenalian, and the dedicator is Lycortas the Syracusan; and it is clear that this Lycortas made the dedication because of his friendship for Phormis. These dedications of Lycortas are also called those of Phormis by the Greeks.

​The Hermes carrying the ram under his armpit, wearing a helmet on his head, and clad in a tunic and a cloak, is no longer among the dedications of Phormis, but has been given to the god by the Arcadians from Pheneus. The inscription says that Onatas the Aeginetan, and with him Calliteles, fashioned it, and it seems to me that Calliteles was a pupil or son of Onatas. Not far from the dedication of the Pheneatians there is another statue, Hermes having a herald’s staff ; and the inscription upon it says that Glaucias of Rhegium by birth dedicated it, and Callon the Elean made it.

​Of the bronze bulls, one is that of the Corcyraeans, and the other is a dedication of the Eretrians, being the work of Philesius the Eretrian. Why the Corcyraeans dedicated the bull at Olympia and another to Delphi, the Phocian part of my account will make clear; but concerning their dedication at Olympia, I heard that the following happened.

​A little boy was playing, sitting under this bull and bending downwards; suddenly raising his head, he broke it against the bronze, and died not many days later from the wound. The Eleans indeed planned to carry the bull out of the Altis as being guilty of blood; but the god in Delphi gave an oracle to let the dedication remain in its place after they had performed over it such purifications as Greeks customary perform for involuntary homicide.

​Under the plane trees in the Altis, about the middle of the enclosure, there is a bronze trophy and an inscription on the shield of the trophy, stating that the Eleans set it up against the Lacedaemonians. In this battle it also befell that man to yield up his life, who, when the roof of the Heraeum was being restored in my time, was found lying there together with his weapons.

​The dedication of the Mendaeans in Thrace came very close to deceiving me into thinking that it was an image of a man practicing the pentathlon; and it lies beside the Elean Anauchidas, and has ancient jumping-weights. An elegiac couplet is written upon its thigh: “To Zeus, the king of gods, the Mendaeans placed me here as a first-fruit, having overcome Sipte by force of hands.” This Sipte seems to be some Thracian fort and city; and the Mendaeans themselves are of Greek race and from Ionia, and they dwell inland from the sea that is near the city of Aenus.