previous next
171.

On this lake they enact by night the story of the god's sufferings, a rite which the Egyptians call the Mysteries. I could say more about this, for I know the truth, but let me preserve a discreet silence. [2] Let me preserve a discreet silence, too, concerning that rite of Demeter which the Greeks call Thesmophoria1 , except as much of it as I am not forbidden to mention. [3] The daughters of Danaus were those who brought this rite out of Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women; afterwards, when the people of the Peloponnese were driven out by the Dorians, it was lost, except in so far as it was preserved by the Arcadians, the Peloponnesian people which was not driven out but left in its home.

1 A festival celebrated by Athenian women in autumn.

Creative Commons License
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.

load focus Notes (W. W. How, J. Wells)
load focus Greek (1920)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Peloponnesus (Greece) (1)
Egypt (Egypt) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (18 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: