Description of Greece

​After the death of Lycurgus, Echemus, the son of Aeropus, the son of Cepheus, the son of Aleus, obtained the rule over the Arcadians. In his time, the Achaeans defeated in battle near the Corinthian isthmus the Dorians as they were descending into the Peloponnese under the leadership of Hyllus, the son of Heracles, and Echemus slew Hyllus, who had fought with him in single combat upon a challenge. For this seemed to me more probable than the earlier account, in which I wrote that Orestes was then ruling the Achaeans, and that Hyllus, during the reign of Orestes, attempted a return to the Peloponnese. And according to the latter of these accounts, it would also appear that Timandra, the daughter of Tyndareus, lived as wife with Echemus, the man who killed Hyllus.

​Agapenor, the son of Ancaeus, the son of Lycurgus, who reigned after Echemus, led the Arcadians to Troy. When Ilion was taken, the storm which overtook the Greeks during their voyage home brought Agapenor and the Arcadian fleet to Cyprus, and Agapenor became the founder of Paphos and built the sanctuary of Aphrodite in Palaepaphos; until then, the goddess had received honors from the Cypriots in a place called Golgi.

​Some time later, Laodice, a descendant of Agapenor, sent a robe to Tegea for Athena Alea; and the inscription upon the offering declared at the same time the lineage of Laodice herself: “This is the robe of Laodice; she dedicated it to her own Athena, To her spacious homeland from sacred Cyprus.” As Agapenor did not return home safe from Ilion, ​Hippothous, the son of Cercyon, the son of Agamedes, the son of Stymphalus, succeeded to the rule. They say that no illustrious event befell him during his life, except that he established his royal seat not in Tegea but in Trapezus; and Aepytus, the son of Hippothous, obtained the rule after his father, and Orestes, the son of Agamemnon, migrated from Mycenae to Arcadia in accordance with an oracle of Apollo at Delphi.

​And to Aepytus, the son of Hippothous, because he dared to enter the sanctuary of Poseidon in Mantineia—into which entrance was not allowed for men either then or up to our day—it befell that upon entering it he was struck blind, and not long after this calamity his life came to an end.

​When Cypselus, the son of Aepytus, was reigning after Aepytus, the Dorian expedition did not descend into the Peloponnese by way of the Corinthian isthmus, as in the three previous generations, but on ships by way of the place called Rhion. Cypselus, having heard of them, found which of the sons of Aristomachus did not yet have a wife, and by giving him his daughter and winning over Cresphontes, both he himself and the Arcadians stood outside of fear.

​Holaeas was the son of Cypselus, and he, together with the Heracleidae from Lacedaemon and Argos, restored his sister’s son Aepytus to Messene. And Holaeas had a son Bucolion, and Bucolion had Phialus, who took away the honor from Phigalus, the son of Lycaon, who was the founder, and changed the name of the city to Phialia after himself; however, his name did not entirely prevail in the end.