LIX. The Lake of Pheneus.—

The lake of Pheneus (for what was a plain in the time of Pausanias is now a lake) is a broad and beautiful sheet of greenish-blue water encircled by lofty mountains which descend in rocky declivities or sheer precipices to the water’s edge, their upper slopes clothed with black pine-woods and their summits capped with snow for many months of the year. Right above the lake on the north-east towers the mighty cone of Cyllene, the loftiest mountain but one in Peloponnese; while on the north-west Dourdouvana rears its long serrated crest, culminating in a sharp bare peak of grey rock, at the foot of which, embowered in trees and gardens, nestles the village of Phonia, the representative of the ancient Pheneus. Here on the north, between the village and the lake, is the only stretch of level ground that breaks the mountain ring, and the luxuriant green of its vineyards and maize-fields contrasts pleasingly with the sombre hue of the pine-forests all around. The first sight of this blue lake embosomed among forest-clad mountains takes the traveller by surprise, so unlike is it to anything else in Greece; and he feels as if suddenly transported from the arid hills and the parched plains of Greece to a northern land—from the land of the olive, the vine, and the orange, to the land of the pine, the mountain, and the lake.

So completely is the lake fenced in by mountains on all sides that no stream can issue from it above ground, and the water escapes only by two subterranean emissaries or Katavothras, as they are called by the Greeks, at the south-eastern and south-western ends of the lake. Through the latter emissary the water passes under the mountain, and issuing on the other side, about six miles from the lake and eight hundred feet below its level, forms the source of the Ladon. On the state of these emissaries it depends whether the great mountain-basin of Pheneus is a fertile plain or a broad lake. From antiquity down to the present century the periods in which the basin has been completely drained have alternated with periods in which it has been occupied by a lake. In the time of Theophrastus (the fourth century B.C.) the bottom of the valley seems to have been generally dry land, for he mentions that once, when the emissaries had got choked up, the water rose and flooded the plain, drowning the willows, firs, and pines, which, however, reappeared the following year when the flood subsided. In the following century part of the valley at least would seem to have been a lake, for the geographer Eratosthenes, quoted by Strabo, informs us that the river Anias formed in front of the city of Pheneus a lake which was drained by subterranean passages, and that when these passages were closed the water rose over the plain, but that when they were opened again it was discharged into the Ladon and hence into the Alpheus in such volume that the sacred precinct at Olympia was flooded, while the lake on the other hand shrank. Strabo himself mentions that the flow of the Ladon was once checked by the obstruction of the emissaries consequent upon an earthquake. According to Pliny there had been down to his time five changes in the condition of the valley from wet to dry and from dry to wet, all of them caused by earthquakes. In Plutarch’s age the flood rose so high that the whole valley was under water, which pious people attributed to Apollo’s anger at Hercules, who was said to have stolen the prophetic tripod at Delphi and carried it off to Pheneus about a thousand years before. However, later on in the same century the waters had again subsided, for Pausanias found the bottom of the valley to be dry land, and knew of the former existence of the lake only from tradition.

From the days of Pausanias down to the beginning of the nineteenth century we have no record of the condition of the valley. In 1806, when Leake and Dodwell visited it, the great valley was still a swampy plain, covered with fields of wheat or barley except at the south-western end, where round the entrance to the emissary the water formed a small lake which never dried up even in summer. But in 1821, doubtless through the obstruction of the emissaries, the water began to rise over the plain, and by 1829-1830, when the French surveyors mapped the district, the whole basin was occupied by a deep lake five miles long by five miles wide. On January 1, 1834, the emissaries suddenly opened again, the Ladon became a deep and raging torrent, the valley was drained, and fresh vegetation sprang up on the rich slimy soil. But when Welcker visited Pheneus in 1842 the valley was once more occupied by a lake, and had been so, if he was correctly informed, since 1838 at least. And a lake it would seem to have been ever since. In 1853 the Swiss scholar Vischer found a great lake, exactly as the French surveyors had represented it on their map; the hill on the north-west side of the valley, on which are the scanty remains of the ancient acropolis, projected like a peninsula into the lake, and the site of the ancient city was deep under water. W. G. Clark in 1856 describes with enthusiasm the “wide expanse of still water deep among the hills, reflecting black pine-woods and grey crags and sky now crimson with sunset”; according to him the lake was seven miles long and as many wide. In June 1888 Mr. Philippson found a broad clear lake of deep green colour; and in the autumn of 1895 I viewed with pleasure the same beautiful scene, though I would describe the colour of the water as greenish-blue rather than green. The lake has shrunk, however, a good deal since the middle of the century. A long stretch of level plain, covered with vineyards and maize-fields, now divides the ancient acropolis of Pheneus from the margin of the lake.