19.

Below these people on the coast are two caves; one, of the nymphs Anigriades; the other, the scene of the adventures of the Atlantides,65 and of the birth of Dardanus. There also are the groves, both the Ionæum and Eurycydeium.

Samicum is a fortress. Formerly there was a city of the name of Samos, which perhaps had its designation from its [Pg 20]
[CAS. 346] height, since they called heights Sami; perhaps also this was the acropolis of Arēnē, which the poet mentions in the Catalogue of the Ships;

“who inhabited Pylus, and the pleasant Arene;”66

for as the position of Arēnē has not been clearly discovered anywhere, it is conjectured, that it was most probably situated where the adjoining river Anigrus, formerly called Minyeius, empties itself. As no inconsiderable proof of this, Homer says,

“There is a river Minyeius, which empties itself into the sea, near Arene.”67

Now near the cave of the nymphs Anigriades is a fountain, by which the subjacent country is rendered marshy, and filled with pools of water. The Anigrus however receives the greater part of the water, being deep, but with so little current that it stagnates. The place is full of mud, emits an offensive smell perceptible at a distance of 26 stadia, and renders the fish unfit for food. Some writers give this fabulous account of these waters, and attribute the latter effect to the venom of the Hydra, which some of the Centaurs68 washed from their wounds; others say, that Melampus used these cleansing waters for the purification of the Prœtades.69 They are a cure for alphi, or leprous eruptions, and the white tetter, and the leichen. They say also that the Alpheus had its name from its property of curing the disease alphi.70

Since then the sluggishness of the Anigrus, and the recoil of the waters of the sea, produce a state of rest rather than a current, they say, that its former name was Minyeïus, but that some persons perverted the name and altered it to Minteïus. The etymology of the name may be derived from other sources; either from those who accompanied Chloris, the mother of Nestor, from the Minyeian Orchomenus; or, from the Minyæ descendants of the Argonauts, who were banished from Lemnos, and went to Lacedæmon, and thence to Triphylia, and settled about Arēnē, in the country now called Hypæsia, which however no longer contains places built by the Minyæ.

Some of these people, with Theras the son of Autesion, who was a descendant of Polynices, having set sail to the country between Cyrenæa and the island of Crete, “formerly Calliste, but afterwards called Thera,” according to Callimachus, founded Thera, the capital of Cyrene, and gave the same name to the city, and to the island.