Description of Greece

​For the Phigalians, there is also in the marketplace a common grave of the chosen men of Oresthasium, and they offer sacrifices to them every year as to heroes.

​The river called Lymax flows past Phigalia itself and empties into the Neda, and they say that the name of the river arose because of the purification of Rhea. For when the nymphs purified her after her labor when she had given birth to Zeus, they threw the purifications into this river; and the ancients, it seems, called these purifications “lymata”. Homer also bears witness to this, saying that the Greeks purified themselves for the removal of the plague and threw the “lymata” into the sea.

​The springs of the Neda are on Mount Cerausium, which is a part of Lycaeum. Where the Neda comes closest to the city of the Phigalians, at this point the Phigalian boys cut off their hair for the river; and the parts of the Neda near the sea are navigable by vessels of no great size. Of all the rivers we know, the Maeander indeed flows down with the most winding current, presenting very many bends upstream and turnings back again; and the Neda would be ranked second in terms of its windings.

​About twelve stades above Phigalia there are warm baths, and not far from these the Lymax flows down into the Neda; and where their streams meet, there is the temple of Eurynome, holy from of old and difficult of approach because of the ruggedness of the place; around it grow many cypresses, dense and continuous with one another.

​As for Eurynome, the common people of the Phigalians believe that it is a surname of Artemis; but those of them who have received ancient records say that Eurynome is a daughter of Ocean, of whom Homer also made mention in the Iliad, saying that she, together with Thetis, received Hephaestus. On the same day every year they open the temple of Eurynome, but at other times it is established as their custom not to open it.

​At this time both public bodies and private individuals offer sacrifices. It was not my fortune to arrive in time for the festival, nor did I see the statue of Eurynome; but I heard from the Phigalians that golden chains bind the wooden image, and that it is an image of a woman as far as the buttocks, and from there on it is a fish. To a daughter of Ocean who dwells with Thetis in the depths of the sea, the fish might indeed offer something as her token; but for Artemis, there is no way that she could, with any reasonable justification, share in such a shape.

​Phigalia is surrounded by mountains, on the left by the one called Cotylium, while on the right another mountain, Elaeum, stands projecting in front of it. Cotylium is about forty stades distant from the city; and on it there is a place called Bassae, and the temple of Apollo Epicurius, both the temple itself and its roof being of stone.

​Of all the temples in the Peloponnese, this one, after the one in Tegea, would be preferred for the beauty of its stone and the harmony of its construction. The name was given to Apollo because he brought help in a pestilential disease, just as among the Athenians he received the title of “Averter of Evil” because he turned away the disease from them as well.

​And he stopped the plague for the Phigalians also during the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, and at no other time; the proofs are both of the surnames of Apollo, which signify something similar, and Ictinus the architect of the temple in Phigalia, who was a contemporary of Pericles in age and built for the Athenians the temple called the Parthenon. My account has already shown that the statue of Apollo is in the marketplace of Megalopolis.

​On Mount Cotylium there is a spring of water, and if anyone has already written that the stream of the river Lymax begins from this spring, he wrote without either seeing it himself or hearing of it from a man who had seen it; both of which facts were present to me: we saw the stream of the river indeed, but the water of the spring on Cotylium does not go very far, but within a short distance becomes altogether invisible. However, it did not occur to me to investigate further where the spring of the Lymax is in Arcadia. Above the temple of Apollo Epicurius is a place called Cotylum, and there is an Aphrodite in Cotylum; and she had a temple which no longer has a roof, and an image had been made of her.