Geography (Books 6-14)

However, let us dismiss these; and let us, taking that which is more obvious, say that, according to Homer, Eurypylus clearly reigned in the region of the Caïcus, so that perhaps a part of the Cilicians were subject to him, in which case there were three dynasties among them and not merely two. This statement is supported by the fact that there is to be seen in the territory of Elaea a torrential stream called the Ceteius; this empties into another like it, and this again into another, and they all end in the Caïcus. But the Caïcus does not flow from Ida, as Bacchylides states; neither is Euripides correct in saying that Marsyasdwells in widely famed Celaenae, in the farthermost region of Ida; for Celaenae is very far from Ida, and the sources of the Caïcus are also very far, for they are to be seen in a plain. Temnus is a mountain which forms the boundary between this plain and the Plain of Apia, as it is called, which lies in the interior above the Plain of Thebe. From Temnus flows a river called Mysius, which empties into the Caïcus below its sources; and it was from this fact, as some interpret the passage, that Aeschylus said at the opening of the prologue to the Myrmidons,Oh! thou Caïcus and ye Mysian in-flows.Near the sources is a village called Gergitha, to which Attalus transferred the Gergithians of the Troad when he had destroyed their place.

Since Lesbos, an island worthy of a full account, lies alongside and opposite the coast which extends from Lectum to Canae, and also has small islands lying round it, some outside it and some between it and the mainland, it is now time to describe these; for these are Aeolian, and I might almost say that Lesbos is the metropolis of the Aeolian cities. But I must begin at the point whence I began to traverse the coast that lies opposite the island.

Now as one sails from Lectum to Assus, the Lesbian country begins at Sigrium, its promontory on the north. In this general neighborhood is also Methymna, a city of the Lesbians, sixty stadia distant from the coast that stretches from Polymedium to Assus. But while the perimeter which is filled out by the island as a whole is eleven hundred stadia, the several distances are as follows: From Methymna to Malia, the southernmost promontory to one keeping the island on the right, I mean at the point where Canae lies most directly opposite the island and precisely corresponds with it, the distance is three hundred and forty stadia; thence to Sigrium, which is the length of the island, five hundred and sixty; and then to Methymna, two hundred and ten. Mitylene, the largest city, lies between Methymna and Malia, being seventy stadia distant from Malia, one hundred and twenty from Canae, and the same distance from the Arginussae, which are three small islands lying near the mainland alongside Canae. In the interval between Mitylene and Methymna, in the neighborhood of a village called Aegeirus in the Methymnaean territory, the island is narrowest, with a passage of only twenty stadia over to the Euripus of the Pyrrhaeans. Pyrrha is situated on the western side of Lesbos at a distance of one hundred stadia from Malia. Mitylene has two harbors, of which the southern can be closed and holds only fifty triremes, but the northern is large and deep, and is sheltered by a mole. Off both lies a small island, which contains a part of the city that is settled there. And the city is well equipped with everything.

Mitylene has produced famous men: in early times, Pittacus, one of the Seven Wise Men; and the poet Alcaeus, and his brother Antimenidas, who, according to Alcaeus, won a great struggle when fighting on the side of the Babylonians, and rescued them from their toils by killing a warrior, the royal wrestler(as he says),who was but one short of five cubits in height.And along with these flourished also Sappho, a marvellous woman; for in all the time of which we have record I do not know of the appearance of any woman who could rival Sappho, even in a slight degree, in the matter of poetry. The city was in those times ruled over by several tyrants because of the dissensions among the inhabitants; and these dissensions are the subject of the Stasiotic poems, as they are called, of Alcaeus. And also Pittacus was one of the tyrants. Now Alcaeus would rail alike at both Pittacus and the rest, Myrsilus and Melanchrus and the Cleanactidae and certain others, though even he himself was not innocent of revolutionary attempts; but even Pittacus himself used monarchy for the overthrow of the oligarchs, and then, after overthrowing them, restored to the city its independence. Diophanes the rhetorician was born much later; but Potamon, Lesbocles, Crinagoras, and Theophanes the historian in my time. Theophanes was also a statesman; and he became a friend to Pompey the Great, mostly through his very ability, and helped him to succeed in all his achievements; whence he not only adorned his native land, partly through Pompey and partly through himself, but also rendered himself the most illustrious of all the Greeks. He left a son, Marcus Pompey, whom Augustus Caesar once set up as Procurator of Asia, and who is now counted among the first of the friends of Tiberius. The Athenians were in danger of suffering an irreparable disgrace when they voted that all Mitylenaeans from youth upwards should be slain, but they changed their minds and their counter-decree reached the generals only one day before the order was to be executed.

Pyrrha has been razed to the ground, but its suburb is inhabited and has a harbor, whence there is a passage of eighty stadia over hills to Mitylene. Then, after Pyrrha, one comes to Eressus; it is situated on a hill and extends down to the sea. Then to Sigrium, twenty-eight stadia from Eressus. Both Theophrastus and Phanias, the peripatetic philosophers, disciples of Aristotle, were from Eressus. Theophrastus was at first called Tyrtamus, but Aristotle changed his name to Theophrastus, at the same time avoiding the cacophony of his name and signifying the fervor of his speech; for Aristotle made all his pupils eloquent, but Theophrastus most eloquent of all. Antissa, a city with a harbor, comes next in order after Sigrium. And then Methymna, whence came Arion, who, according to a myth told by Herodotus and his followers, safely escaped on a dolphin to Taenarum after being thrown into the sea by the pirates. Now Arion played, and sang to, the cithara; and Terpander, also, is said to have been an artist in the same music and to have been born in the same island, having been the first person to use the seven-stringed instead of the four-stringed lyre, as we are told in the verses attributed to him: For thee I, having dismissed four-toned song, shall sing new hymns to the tune of a seven-stringed cithara.Also Hellanicus the historian, and Cailias, who interpreted Sappho and Alcaeus, were Lesbians.

In the strait between Asia and Lesbos there are about twenty small islands, but according to Timosthenes, forty. They are called Hecatonnesi, a compound name like Peloponnesus, the second letter n being customarily redundant in such compounds, as in the names Myonnesus, Proconnesus, and Halonnesus; and consequently we have Hecatonnesi, which means Apollonnesi, for Apollo is called Hecatus; for along the whole of this coast, as far as Tenedos, Apollo is highly honored, being called Sminthian or Cillaean or Grynian or by some other appellation. Near these islands is Pordoselene, which contains a city of the same name, and also, in front of this city, another island, larger and of the same name, which is uninhabited and has a temple sacred to Apollo.

Some writers, to avoid the indecency of the names, say that in this place we should read “Poroselene,” and that we should call Aspordenum, the rocky and barren mountain round Pergamum, “Asporenum,” and the temple of the Mother of the gods there the temple of the “Asporene” mother. What, then, shall we say of Pordalis and Saperdes and Perdiccas, and of the phrase of Simonides,banished, ‘pordacian’ clothes and all,instead of “wet” clothes, and, somewhere in the early comedy,the place is ‘pordacian,’that is, the place that is “marshy”? Lesbos is equidistant from Tenedos and Lemnos and Chios, one might say rather less than five hundred stadia.

Since the Leleges and the Cilicians were so closely related to the Trojans, people inquire for the reason why they are not included with the Trojans in the Catalogue. But it is reasonable to suppose that because of the loss of their leaders and the sacking of their cities the few Cilicians that were left were placed under the command of Hector, for both Eëtion and his sons are said to have been slain before the Catalogue:Verily my father was slain by the goodly Achilles, who utterly sacked the well-peopled city of Cilicians, Thebe of the lofty gates. And the seven brothers of mine in our halls, all these on the same day went inside the home of Hades, for all were slain by swift-footed, goodly Achilles.And so, in the same way, those subject to Mynes lost both their leaders and their city: And he laid low Mynes and Epistrophus, and sacked the city of godlike Mynes.But he makes the Leleges present at the battles when he says as follows: Towards the sea are situated the Carians and the Paeonians, with curved bows, and the Leleges and Caucones.And again,he pierced with a sharp spear Satnius, son of Oenops, whom a noble Naiad nymph bore to Oenops, as he tended his herds beside the banks of the Satnioeis;for they had not so completely disappeared that they did not have a separate organization of their own, since their king still survived,of Altes, who is lord over the war-loving Leleges,and since their city had not been utterly wiped out, for the poet adds,who holds steep Pedasus on the Satnioeis.However, the poet has omitted them in the Catalogue, not considering their organization sufficient to have a place in it, or else including them under the command of Hector because they were so closely related; for Lycaon, who was a brother of Hector, says,to a short span of life my mother, daughter of the old man Altes, bore me—Altes who is lord over the war-loving Leleges.Such, then, are the probabilities in this matter.

And it is also a matter of reasoning from probabilities if one inquires as to the exact bounds to which the poet means that the Cilicians extended, and the Pelasgians, and also the Ceteians, as they are called, under the command of Eurypylus, who lived between those two peoples. Now as for the Cilicians and the peoples under the command of Eurypylus, all has been said about them that can be said, and that their country is in a general way bounded by the region of the Caïcus River. As for the Pelasgians, it is reasonable, both from the words of Homer and from history in general, to place them next in order after these peoples; for Homer says as follows: And Hippothoüs led the tribes of the Pelasgians that rage with the spear, them that dwelt in fertile Larisa; these were ruled by Hippothoüs and Pylaeus, scion of Ares, the two sons of Pelasgian Lethus, son of Teutamus.By these words he clearly indicates that the number of Pelasgians was considerable, for he says “tribes,” not “tribe;” and he also specifies their abode as “in Larisa.” Now there are many Larisas, but we must interpret him as meaning one of those that were near; and best of all one might rightly assume the one in the neighborhood of Cyme; for of the three Larisas the one near Hamaxitus was in plain sight of Ilium and very near it, within a distance of two hundred stadia, and therefore it could not be said with plausibility that Hippothoüs fell in the fight over Patroclus “far away from” this “Larisa,” but rather from the Larisa near Cyme, for the distance between the two is about a thousand stadia. The third Larisa is a village in the territory of Ephesus in the Caÿster Plain; it is said to have been a city in earlier times, containing a temple of Larisaean Apollo and being situated closer to Mt. Tmolus than to Ephesus. It is one hundred and eighty stadia distant from Ephesus, and might therefore be placed under the Maeonians. But the Ephesians, having grown in power, later cut off for themselves much of the territory of the Maeonians, whom we now call Lydians, so that this could not be the Larisa of the Pelasgians either, but rather the one near Cyme. In fact we have no strong evidence that the Larisa in the Caÿster Plain was already in existence at that time, for we have no such evidence as to Ephesus either; but all Aeolian history, which arose but shortly after the Trojan times, bears testimony to the existence of the Larisa near Cyme.

For it is said that the people who set out from Phricium, the Locrian mountain above Thermopylae, put in at the place where Cyme now is, and finding the Pelasgians in bad plight because of the Trojan War, though still in possession of Larisa, which was about seventy stadia distant from Cyme, built on their frontier what is still today called Neon Teichos, thirty stadia from Larisa, and that, having captured Larisa, they founded Cyme and settled there the survivors. And Cyme is called Cyme Phriconis after the Locrian mountain; and likewise Larisa is called Larisa Phriconis; but Larisa is now deserted. That the Pelasgians were a great tribe is said also to be the testimony of history in general: Menecrates of Elaea, at any rate, in his work On the Founding of Cities, says that the whole of what is now the Ionian coast, beginning at Mycale, as also the neighboring islands, were in earlier times inhabited by Pelasgians. But the Lesbians say that their people were placed under the command of Pylaeus, the man whom the poet calls the ruler of the Pelasgians, and that it is from him that the mountain in their country is still called Pylaeus. The Chians, also, say that the Pelasgians from Thessaly were their founders. But the Pelasgian race, ever wandering and quick to migrate, greatly increased and then rapidly disappeared, particularly at the time of the migration of the Aeolians and Ionians to Asia.

A peculiar thing happened in the case of the Larisaeans, I mean the Caÿstrian and the Phryconian Larisaeans and, third, those in Thessaly: they all held land that was deposited by rivers, by the Caÿster and by the Hermus and by the Peneius. It is at the Phryconian Larisa that Piasus is said to have been honored, who, they say, was ruler of the Pelasgians and fell in love with his daughter Larisa, and, having violated her, paid the penalty for the outrage; for, observing him leaning over a cask of wine, they say, she seized him by the legs, raised him, and plunged him into the cask. Such are the ancient accounts.

To the present Aeolian cities we must add Aegae, and also Temnus, the birthplace of Hermagoras, who wrote The Art of Rhetoric. These cities are situated in the mountainous country that lies above the territory of Cyme and that of the Phocians and that of the Smyrnaeans, along which flows the Hermus. Neither is Magnesia, which was under the command of Sipylus and has been adjudged a free city by the Romans, far from these cities. This city too has been damaged by the recent earthquakes. To the opposite parts, which incline towards the Caïcus, from Larisa across the Hermus to Cyme, the distance is seventy stadia; thence to Myrina, forty stadia; thence to Grynium, the same; and from there to Elaea. But, according to Artemidorus, one goes from Cyme to Adae, and then, forty stadia distant, to a promontory called Hydra, which with the opposite promontory Harmatus forms the Elaïtic Gulf. Now the width of the mouth of this gulf is about eighty stadia, but, including the sinuosities of the gulf, Myrina, an Aeolian city with a harbor, is at a distance of sixty stadia; and then one comes to the Harbor of the Achaeans, where are the altars of the twelve gods; and then to a town Grynium and an altar of Apollo and an ancient oracle and a costly shrine of white marble, to which the distance is forty stadia; and then seventy stadia to Elaea, with harbor and naval station belonging to the Attalic Kings, which was founded by Menestheus and the Athenians who took the expedition with him to Ilium. I have already spoken of the places that come next, those about Pitane and Atarneus and the others in that region.

The largest and best of the Aeolian cities is Cyme; and this with Lesbos might be called the metropolis of the rest of the cities, about thirty in number, of which not a few have disappeared. Cyme is ridiculed for its stupidity, owing to the repute, as some say, that not until three hundred years after the founding of the city did they sell the tolls of the harbor, and that before this time the people did not reap this revenue. They got the reputation, therefore, of being a people who learned late that they were living in a city by the sea. There is also another report of them, that, having borrowed money in the name of the state, they pledged their porticos as security, and then, failing to pay the money on the appointed day, were prohibited from walking in them; when it rained, however, their creditors, through a kind of shame, would bid them through a herald to go under the porticos; so the herald would cry out the words, “Go under the porticos,” but the report went abroad that the Cymaeans did not understand that they were to go under the porticos when it rained unless they were given notice by the herald. Ephorus, a man indisputably noteworthy, a disciple of Isocrates the orator, and the author of the Historyand of the work on Inventions, was from this city; and so was Hesiod the poet, still earlier than Ephorus, for Hesiod himself states that his father Dius left Aeolian Cyme and migrated to Boeotia: And he settled near Helicon in a wretched village, Ascre, which is bad in winter, oppressive in summer, and pleasant at no time. But it is not agreed that Homer was from Cyme, for many peoples lay claim to him. It is agreed, however, that the name of the city was derived from an Amazon, as was Myrina from the Amazon who lies in the Trojan plain below Batieia,which verily men call Batieia, but the immortals the tomb of much-bounding Myrina. Ephorus, too, is ridiculed because, though unable to tell of deeds of his native land in his enumeration of the other achievements in history, and yet unwilling that it should be unmentioned, he exclaims as follows: At about the same time the Cymaeans were at peace.

Since I have traversed at the same time the Trojan and Aeolian coasts, it would be next in order to treat cursorily the interior as far as the Taurus, observing the same order of approach.

A kind of hegemony is held over these places by Pergamum, which is a famous city and for a long time prospered along with the Attalic kings; indeed I must begin my next description here, and first I must show briefly the origin of the kings and the end to which they came. Now Pergamum was a treasure-hold of Lysimachus, the son of Agathocles, who was one of the successors of Alexander, and its people are settled on the very summit of the mountain; the mountain is cone-like and ends in a sharp peak. The custody of this stronghold and the treasure, which amounted to nine thousand talents, was entrusted to Philetaerus of Tieium, who was a eunuch from boyhood; for it came to pass at a certain burial, when a spectacle was being given at which many people were present, that the nurse who was carrying Philetaerus, still an infant, was caught in the crowd and pressed so hard that the child was incapacitated. He was a eunuch, therefore, but he was well trained and proved worthy of this trust. Now for a time he continued loyal to Lysimachus, but he had differences with Arsinoe, the wife of Lysimachus, who slandered him, and so he caused Pergamum to revolt, and governed it to suit the occasion, since he saw that it was ripe for a change; for Lysimachus, beset with domestic troubles, was forced to slay his son Agathocles, and Seleucus Nicator invaded his country and overthrew him, and then he himself was overthrown and treacherously murdered by Ptolemy Ceraunus. During these disorders the eunuch continued to be in charge of the fortress and to manage things through promises and courtesies in general, always catering to any man who was powerful or near at hand. At any rate, he continued lord of the stronghold and the treasure for twenty years.

He had two brothers, the elder of whom was Eumenes, the younger Attalus. Eumenes had a son of the same name, who succeeded to the rule of Pergamum, and was by this time sovereign of the places round about, so that he even joined battle with Antiochus the son of Seleucus near Sardeis and conquered him. He died after a reign of twenty-two years. Attalus, the son of Attalus and Antiochis, daughter of Achaeus, succeeded to the throne and was the first to be proclaimed king, after conquering the Galatians in a great battle. Attalus not only became a friend of the Romans but also fought on their side against Philip along with the fleet of the Rhodians. He died in old age, having reigned as king forty-three years; and he left four sons by Apollonis, a woman from Cyzicus, Eumenes, Attalus, Philetaerus, and Athenaeus. Now the two younger sons remained private citizens, but Eumenes, the elder of the other two, reigned as king. Eumenes fought on the side of the Romans against Antiochus the Great and against Perseus, and he received from the Romans all the country this side the Taurus that had been subject to Antiochus. But before that time the territory of Pergamum did not include many places that extended as far as the sea at the Elaïtic and Adramyttene Gulfs. He built up the city and planted Nicephorium with a grove, and the other elder brother, from love of splendor, added sacred buildings and libraries and raised the settlement of Pergamum to what it now is. After a reign of forty-nine years Eumenes left his empire to Attallus, his son by Stratonice, the daughter of Ariathres, king of the Cappadocians. He appointed his brother Attalus as guardian both of his son, who was extremely young, and of the empire. After a reign of twenty-one years, his brother died an old man, having won success in many undertakings; for example, he helped Demetrius, the son of Seleucus, to defeat in war Alexander, the son of Antiochus, and he fought on the side of the Romans against the Pseudo-Philip, and in an expedition against Thrace he defeated Diegylis the king of the Caeni, and he slew Prusias, having incited his son Nicomedes against him, and he left his empire, under a guardian, to Attalus. Attalus, surnamed Philometor, reigned five years, died of disease, and left the Romans his heirs. The Romans proclaimed the country a province, calling it Asia, by the same name as the continent. The Caïcus flows past Pergamum, through the Caïcus Plain, as it is called, traversing land that is very fertile and about the best in Mysia.