Description of Greece

​At that time Greece fell into the ultimate state of weakness, having been ruined in parts and utterly devastated from the beginning by fortune. Argos, a city that had reached the highest point of power in the era of the so-called heroes, lost the favor of fortune simultaneously with the transition to the Dorians;

​and the Attic nation, though it had recovered and raised itself up again after the Peloponnesian War and the plague, was destined not many years later to be cast down by the peak of Macedonian power; and the anger of Alexander fell from Macedonia upon Boeotian Thebes. For the Lacedaemonians, Epaminondas the Theban was their ruin, and later the war with the Achaeans; and when, with difficulty, as if from a tree maimed and mostly withered, the Achaean League sprouted again from Greece, the wickedness of its generals cut it down while it was still growing.

​In later times the Roman sovereignty devolved upon Nero, and Nero set all of Greece free, making an exchange with the Roman people; for he gave them in return for Greece the island of Sardinia, which was especially prosperous. Looking therefore at this act of Nero, Plato the son of Ariston seemed to me to have spoken most correctly, that all wrongdoings that surpass in size and audacity belong not to ordinary men, but to a noble soul corrupted by an improper education.

​Yet the Greeks were not permitted to enjoy the gift; for when Vespasian ruled after Nero, they were led into civil strife, and Vespasian ordered them to be taxpayers again and to obey a governor, saying that the Greek nation had unlearned freedom.

​These things I found to have happened thus. The boundary of the territory between the Achaeans and the Eleans is the river Larisus and the temple of Larisaean Athena upon the river, and the Achaean city Dyme is about thirty stades distant from the Larisus. Philip the son of Demetrius, when waging war, had this city alone of the Achaean cities subject to him, and for this reason Sulpicius, who was also a Roman general, permitted his army to plunder Dyme; and Augustus later assigned it to the Patraeans.

​It was called Paleia in older times; but while the Ionians still possessed it, they changed its name to the present one, though I do not know for certain whether it was from a native woman Dyme, or from Dymas the son of Aegimius. One would not be led into confusion by the elegiac inscription at Olympia upon the statue of Oebotas; for for Oebotas, a man of Dyme who won the victory in the stade in the sixth Olympiad, and was deemed worthy of a statue at Olympia around the eightieth Olympiad according to an oracle from Delphi, there is an inscription on it saying:

” This Achaean, Oebotas son of Oenias, winning the stade, made his homeland Paleia more famous.” This, therefore, would not cause anyone confusion, if the inscription calls the city Paleia and not Dyme; for it is established among the Greeks to introduce older names into poetry instead of later ones, and they call Amphiaraus and Adrastus descendants of Phoroneus, and Theseus a descendant of Erechtheus.