Description of Greece

​The wrath of the Suppliant is present to those who look at Helice, and it is possible for many others to be taught how implacable it is; and the god in Dodona also clearly advises │ showing respect to suppliants. For to the Athenians, particularly in the time of Apheidas, these verses came from Zeus in Dodona: “Take heed of the Areopagus and the fragrant altars of the Eumenides, where the Lacedaemonians, hard pressed by the spear, must supplicate you. Do not slay them with the sword, nor wrong suppliants; for suppliants are sacred and holy.”

​These words came to the minds of the Greeks when the Peloponnesians marched against Athens, at the time when Codrus, son of Melanthus, was king of the Athenians. Now the rest of the Peloponnesian army withdrew from Attica when they learned of the death of Codrus and in what manner it had happened; for they no longer hoped for victory for themselves, according to the oracle from Delphi. But some Lacedaemonian men, having got inside the wall, remained there undetected during the night; but at daybreak they realized that their own people had gone, and as the Athenians were gathering against them, they fled for refuge to the Areopagus and to the altars of the goddesses who are called the August Ones.

​At that time, the Athenians allowed the suppliants to depart unharmed. But some time later, those who held the magistracies themselves put to death the suppliants of Athena, who had seized the Acropolis along with Cylon; and both the killers themselves and their descendants were considered accursed of the goddess. And as for the Lacedaemonians, who also had killed men who had fled for refuge to the sanctuary of Poseidon at Taenarum, not long afterwards their city was shaken by a continuous and violent earthquake, so that not a single house │ in Lacedaemon withstood it.

​The destruction of Helice took place when Asteius was still archon at Athens, in the fourth year of the hundred and first Olympiad, in which Damon of Thurii won his first victory. And as the Helicians no longer existed, the Aegians possess their land.

​After Helice, you will turn aside from the sea to the right and come to the small town of Cerynea. It is built on a mountain above the high road, and its name was given to it either by a local ruler or by the river Cerynites, which, flowing from Arcadia and the mountain Cerynea, passes by the Achaeans of this region. To them, Mycenaeans came to dwell together as fellow-citizens owing to a disaster, from Argolis. For the wall of the Mycenaeans could not be taken by force by the Argives, since it had been fortified in the same manner as ​that in Tiryns by the so-called Cyclopes; but of necessity the Mycenaeans abandoned their city, as their provisions failed them; and some of them withdrew to Cleonae, while more than half of the people fled for refuge to Macedonia, to Alexander, to whom Mardonius, son of Gobryas, entrusted the message to be delivered to the Athenians; and the rest of the people came to Cerynea, and Cerynea became both more powerful in the number of its inhabitants and more famous thereafter, because of the cohabitation of the Mycenaeans.