[5]
It is between Chelonatas and Cyllene that the River Peneius empties; as also the River Sellëeis, which is mentioned by the poet and flows out of Pholoe. On the Sellëeis is situated a city Ephyra, which is to be distinguished from the Thesprotian, Thessalian, and Corinthian Ephyras;1 it is a fourth Ephyra, and is situated on the road that leads to Lasion, being either the same city as Boenoa (for thus Oenoe is usually called), or else near that city, at a distance of one hundred and twenty stadia from the city of the Eleians. This, apparently, is the Ephyra which Homer calls the home of the mother of Tlepolemus the son of Heracles (for the expeditions of Heracles were in this region rather than in any of the other three) when he says, “"whom he had brought out of Ephyra, from the River Sellëeis"
”2.3 and there is no River Sellëeis near the other Ephyras. Again, he says of the corselet of Meges: “"this corselet Phyleus once brought out of Ephyra, from the River Sellëeis."
”4 And thirdly, the man-slaying drugs: for Homer says that Odysseus came to Ephyra “"in search of a man-slaying drug, that he might have wherewithal to smear his arrows"
”5; and in speaking of Telemachus the wooers say: “"or else he means to go to the fertile soil of Ephyra, that from there he may bring deadly drugs"
”6; for Nestor, in his narrative of his war against the Epeians, introduces the daughter of Augeas, the king of the Epeians, as a mixer of drugs: “"I was the first that slew a man, even the spearman Mulius; he was a son-in-law of Augeias, having married his eldest daughter, and she knew all drugs that are nourished by the wide earth."
”7 But there is another River Sellëeis near Sicyon, and near the river a village Ephyra. And in the Agraean district of Aetolia there is a village Ephyra; its inhabitants are called Ephyri. And there are still other Ephyri, I mean the branch of the Perrhaebians who live near Macedonia (the Crannonians),8 as also those Thesprotian Ephyri of Cichyrus,9 which in earlier times was called Ephyra.
Strabo. ed. H. L. Jones, The Geography of Strabo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.