CHAPTER XXXI

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There is also at Helicon a statue of Arsinoe, whom Ptolemy married though he was her brother. A brazen ostrich supports it. Ostriches have wings like other birds, but from their weight and size their wings do not enable them to fly. There is also a doe suckling Telephus the son of Hercules, and a cow, and a statue of Priapus well worth seeing. Priapus is honoured especially where there are flocks of sheep or goats, or swarms of bees. And the people of Lampsacus honour him more than all the gods, and say that he is the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite.[68]

At Helicon there are also several tripods, the most ancient is the one they say Hesiod received at Chalcis by the Euripus for a victory in song. And men live round the grove, and the Thespians hold a festival there and have games to the Muses, and also to Eros, in which they give prizes not only for music but to athletes also. And after ascending from this grove 20 stades you come to Hippocrene, a spring formed they say by the horse of Bellerophon striking the earth with its hoof. And the Bœotians that dwell about Helicon have a tradition that Hesiod wrote nothing but _The Works and Days_, and from this they take away the address to the Muses, and make the poem commence at the part about Strife.[69] And they showed me some lead near Hippocrene almost entirely rotten with age, on which _The Works and Days_ was written. A very contrary view to this is that Hesiod has written several poems, as that _On Women_, and _The Great Eœœ_, and _The Theogony_ and _The Poem on Melampus_, and _The Descent of Theseus and Pirithous to Hades_, and _The Exhortation of Chiron for the Instruction of Achilles_, and all _The Works and Days_. The same people tell us also that Hesiod learnt his divination from the Acarnanians, and there are some verses of his _On Divination_ which I have read, and a _Narrative of Prodigies_. There are also different accounts about his death. For though it is universally agreed that Ctimenus and Antiphus, the sons of Ganyctor, fled to Molycria from Naupactus because of the murder of Hesiod, and were sentenced there because of their impiety to Poseidon, yet some say that the charge against Hesiod of having violated their sister was not true, others say he was really guilty. Such are the different accounts about Hesiod and his Works.

On the top of Mount Helicon is a small river called the Lamus. And in the district of Thespia is a place called Donacon, (_Reed-bed_), where is the fountain of Narcissus, who they say looked into this water, and not observing that it was his own shadow which he saw was secretly enamoured of himself, and died of love near the fountain. This is altogether silly that any grown person should be so possessed by love as not to know the difference between a human being and a shadow. There is another tradition about him, not so well known as the other, _viz._ that he had a twin-sister, and that the two were almost facsimiles in appearance and hair and dress, and used to go out hunting together, and that Narcissus was in love with this sister, and when she died he used to frequent this fountain and knew that it was his own shadow which he saw, yet though he knew this it gratified his love to think that it was not his own shadow but the image of his sister that he was looking at. But the earth produced I think the flower narcissus earlier than this, if one may credit the verses of Pamphus: for though he was much earlier than the Thespian Narcissus, he says that Proserpine the daughter of Demeter was playing and gathering flowers when she was carried off, and that she was deceived not by violets but by narcissuses.[70]

[68] So Tibullus calls Priapus “Bacchi rustica proles,” i. 4. 7.

[69] _viz._, at line 11.

[70] See Homer’s Hymn to Demeter, lines 8-10.

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