Book VIII, Arcadia, [3] When I began to write my history I thought these Greek stories were rather silly, but now that I have reached Arkadia I have decided to treat them from the point of view that the famous Greek wise men told their stories in riddle

Pausanias in Arcadia

Selected excerpts from Pausanias, Guide to Greece, Vol. 2, Translated with an Introduction by Peter Levi, S. J.(!) Penguin Books, 1971

Bk.VIII, Arkadia

VIII, 8, [3] When I began to write my history I thought these Greek stories were rather silly, but now that I have reached Arkadia I have decided to treat them from the point of view that the famous Greek wise men told their stories in riddles and not out of stupidity, and I conjectured that what was said of Kronos was a piece of Greek wisdom. So in religious matters this is the principle we shall follow....

VIII, 41, [4] A mile and a half above Phigalia there are HOT BATHS, not far from which the Lymax joins the Neda. Where the rivers join is the SANCTUARY OF EURYNOME, holy from ancient times and inaccessibly situated in broken country. A continuous, dense wood of cypresses grows round it.297 [5] The religious belief of the Phigalian people has been that Eurynome is a title of Artemis, but students of ancient records say Eurynome is a daughter of Ocean, in fact Homer has written in the Iliad that she was with Thetis at the entertainment of Hephaistos.298 On the same day in every year they open Eurynome's sanctuary, but for the rest of the time tradition dictates it should not be opened. [6] On that day though they offer sacrifices privately and publicly. I did not manage to be there at the moment of the festival and have not seen Eurynome's statue, though the Phigalians told me it is a wooden idol tied up with gold chains, like a woman down to the buttocks, and below that like a fish. There may be something about a fish that suggests a daughter of Ocean who lives with Thetis in the depths of the sea, but by no stretch of reasonable probability has it anything to do with Artemis.299

[7] Phigalia is surrounded by mountains: it has Kotilion on the left, and another mountain projecting on the right, Mount Elaion. Kotilion is just five miles from the city; there is r a place there called Bassai with the Temple of Apollo the Helper, even the roof of which is made of stone. [8] Of all the temples in the Peloponnese this one could be considered second only to the temple at Tegea for its proportions and the beauty of its stone.300 Apollo was named the Helper because of a plague, just as he was named Tumer-away-of-evil at Athens for turning away a pestilence there. [9] His action at Phigalia as at Athens was during the Peloponnesian War. This is proved by Apollo's two titles having the same meaning, and the fact that Iktinos the architect of the temple at Phigalia was a contemporary of Perikles and built the Parthenon at Athens. I have already said that the statue of Apollo is in the market-place at Megalopolis.301

[10] There is a spring of water on mount Kotilon, and the man who recorded that this spring is the source of the river Lymax had neither seen what he was writing about nor heard about it from anyone who had seen it; personally I have done both. We saw the course of the river, and also the water of the spring on Kotilon; it does not travel far and soon disappears altogether. I have not studied where in Arkadia the head-spring of the Lymax is to be found. Above the sanctuary of Apollo the Helper there is a place called Kotilon, and an Aphrodite in Kotilon; she had a temple which had lost its roof and a statue.302

[1] Elaion the other mountain is about four miles from A Phigalia; there is a Cave of Demeter there with the title Black Demeter.303 The Phigalians believe the same as they say at Thelpousa about the coupling of Poseidon and Demeter, though the Phigalians say Demeter gave birth not to a horse but the goddess Arkadians call the Mistress.304 [2] They say she was furious with Poseidon and grieved at the rape of Persephone, put on black, and went into this cave and stayed there for a long time. All the earth produces was perishing and the human race was even worse devastated by famine, but none of the gods knew where Demeter was hiding. [3] At that time Pan came into Arkadia to hunt, now over one mountain and now over another, and at Mount Elaion he sighted Demeter, saw how she looked and how she was dressed. So Zeus found out from Pan and sent the Fates to Demeter; she obeyed them and put away her anger, and forgot her grief. The Phigalians say because of all this they considered the cave as sacred to Demeter, and dedicated a wooden statue there. [4] The statue was like this: she was sitting on a rock, and looked like a woman except for the head; she had a horse's head and mane, with serpents and other beasts sprouting out of her head; she wore a tunic down to her feet, she had a dolphin on one hand and a dove on the other. To anyone of intelligence with a good memory it is obvious why they made the wooden image in this shape.305 They say she was named Black Demeter because the goddess also was dressed in black. [5] It is not recorded who made the statue or how it came to be burnt; when the old one was gone the Phigalians did not give the goddess another statue, and neglected most of the observances of festival and sacrifice, until the earth was struck barren, and the Pythian priestess answered their petition with this prophecy:

[6] Arkadian, Azanian acorn-eaters, people of Phigalia, people of stallion-mated Deo's hidden cave you came for a cure of painful famine, in exile twice, living wild twice, no one but you: and Deo took you home, made you sheaf-carriers and oatcake-eaters, makes you live wild now, because you stopped your fathers' worship, her ancient honours. You shall consume yourselves, be child-eaters if your whole people will not soothe her spleen, and dress the deep cave in divine honours.306

[7] When the Phigalians heard the oracle that was brought to them, they honoured Demeter more than they ever had before, and they persuaded Onatas son of Mikon of Aigina, whatever they had to pay him, to make them a statue of Demeter. The bronze Pergamene Apollo, one of the most astounding of all works of art for its size and fineness, is by the same Onatas.307 So now he found a copy or a painting of the ancient wooden idol, and found out most, so they say, by a vision of it in his sleep, and made the Phigalians a statue in bronze, just two generations after the Persian expedition against Greece.....

...[11] This Demeter was my principal reason for coming to Phigalia. According to the traditional local observance I slaughtered nothing to the goddess; the sacred law for her sacrifice dictates that private individuals and once a year the whole Phigalian community should take the fruit of cultivated trees, particularly the grape, and the honeycomb, and greasy unspun wool, and lay them on the altar constructed in front of the cave, with oil poured over them. [12] The ceremony is performed by a priestess with the youngest of the "sacrificial ministers" as they call them, who are three of the citizens. There is a sacred grove of oaks around the cave, where cold water springs out of the ground. But in my time the statue Onatas made was no longer in existence, and most of the Phigalians had no idea there had ever been one, [13] though the oldest man we met told us there had been a fall of rocks from the roof that hit the statue three generations before his time. He said the statue was smashed and had completely disappeared. And in fact you could still see in the roof of the cave how the rocks had broken off.

Footnotes by Peter Levi, S.J.

297. There is every kind of extraordinary water effect in the gorges of the Neda but there are now no hot springs so far as I could discover. Eurynome's sanctuary is lost unless it is the ruins about a mile east of Phigalia, which is unlikely (RE, XIX (a), 2072-3).

298. Iliad, IS, 398.

299. She was a vigorously rustic water-nymph.

300. Bassai means "the glens'; the temple site (STYLI or STYLOUS, which means the pillars) is on a high ridge east of Phigalia. It is best approached by the ancient track through DKAGOI and across the mountains, which I remember as considerably more than four miles. The temple of Bassai is really as fine as Pausanias says it is, but most of its wonderful frieze was stolen by the architect Charles R. Cockerell and his partner Haller von Hallerstein, and ended up in the British Museum, where until recently it was kept in a locked room for twenty or thirty years. There is a curious plaster reconstruction in the library of the

Travellers' Club, and another on the main stairs of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford (by Cockerell, who also imitated a Bassai column in Oxford). I do not Inow whether it is the stone, the specially pleasing architecture, or its setting among high mountains that makes the temple one of the freshest and sharpest monuments in Greece. It was discovered accidentally by a French architect called Bochor in 1765, who was later killed for his brass buttons, which were believed to be gold, when he revisited the area.

301. Cf. Bk VIII, 30 (3). Iktinos also rebuilt the sacred building for the initiations at Eleusis, and Apollo's temple at Bassai. On technical evidence the Bassai temple cannot be much earlier than 420 B.C. and may be later; its ground-plan is strangely old-fashioned, perhaps because it imitated the old Apollo temple at Delphi. It is in several ways very unlike the Parthenon, which is also a structurally eccentric building, but if excellence is the criterion it is a fine enough piece of work to be by Iktinos. It is interesting that neither Apollo's temple at Bassai nor the Parthenon conforms to the rigid canons of Doric architecture, and that they were both decorated with continuous relief carvings, that swirl like drapery. At Bassai the feeze was inside the temple. The temple was oriented north-south; the statue stood against the west wall and faced the sunrise through a side door in the east wall. This arrangement probably has nothing to do with the impressive sunrise over Lykaion or with the lie of the land; there are other north-south temples in western Arkadia.

302. The spring is below the temple to the west. It still has some of its classical marbles, and was still running in 1963, although not strongly in summer. The bald crest above the temple is probably Kotilon. The sacred area was investigated and excavations carried out in the 1900s by the Greek archaeological service (Eph. Arch., 1910, p. 271).

303. It is not clear which mountain Pausanias means. The cave of Demeter is surely one of the many caves in the Neda gorge; I believe a sacred cave was found by Orlandos upstream of the STOMIO, but I can find no published reference to it; we cannot be certain of its not belonging to Eurynome or to Pan. There are several caves at Stomio itself, including a fine rocky pothole or cavern into which the Neda vanishes underground. The cult-cave might have been one of the caves on a rocky terrace on the north side of the gorge above the Neda cavern, where there is a chapel of the Virgin; the furthest, smallest cave, beyond the ruins of the old chapel, is the entrance to a cave-system which I have not thoroughly explored. There are other cave sanctuaries where a narrow or very narrow passage leads away into the rock (Trophonios's cave at Lebadeia for example), and there are some local superstitious practices and popular stories that suggest there has been a cult here from remote times. It may be the site of the Phigalian oracle of the dead (Bk III,17 (9)) which did not exist in Pausanias's time; I cannot believe he would have scrambled down into the gorge and seen the Neda cavern without discussing it. The village of STOMlON is not the same as the place I am talking about, which is best reached not from Phigalia but from PLATANIA south of the river, and SIDBBOKASTRO farther south. One cannot get anywhere near it in a car.

304.Cf BkVIII,25(4f)

305. The horse belongs to Poseidon or Demeter (who sits on a horse-skin in the Parthenon frieze), the serpents are chthonic, the dolphin belongs to Poseidon, and the dove to Persephone.

306. Wilamowitz (Glaube, I, 402f.) disbelieves this story; the oracle would have been given in the mid fifth century. It seems to me acceptable. This exile has no connexion with the story of the Oresthasians (Bk VIII, 39 (3-4)); it is a question of economic hardship and a second exile.

307. Onatas's work and influence travelled all over Greece. The great bronze Poseidon now at Athens from the sea off Cape Artemision could conceivably come from his workshop (cf. Dorig in the Thames and Hudson Art and Architecture of Ancient Greece, 1967, pp. 277-8; cf. also Bk V, 25 (13), and the Note there). The pedestal of the Pergamene Apollo has been found (Inschriften von Pergamon, 48) and a poem about it exists in the Palatine Anthology (9, 238). . Sculptors. This whole discussion represents the kind of argument on which Pausanias's ideas about the history of sculpture rested. It was a matter of establishing generations; only then would stylistic analysis proceed. He was right to want a chronology independent of the 'evolution' of style, but questions about generations are befogged by the recurrence of names.