previous next
[3]

In this Antitaurus are deep and narrow valleys, in which are situated Comana and the temple of Enyo,1 whom the people there call "Ma." It is a considerable city; its inhabitants, however, consist mostly of the divinely inspired people and the temple-servants who live in it. Its inhabitants are Cataonians, who, though in a general way classed as subject to the king, are in most respects subject to the priest. The priest is master of the temple, and also of the temple-servants, who on my sojourn there were more than six thousand in number, men and women together. Also, considerable territory belongs to the temple, and the revenue is enjoyed by the priest. He is second in rank in Cappadocia after the king; and in general the priests belonged to the same family as the kings. It is thought that Orestes, with his sister Iphigeneia, brought these sacred rites here from the Tauric Scythia, the rites in honor of Artemis Tauropolus, and that here they also deposited the hair2 of mourning; whence the city's name. Now the Sarus River flows through this city and passes out through the gorges of the Taurus to the plains of the Cilicians and to the sea that lies below them.

1 Goddess of war (Hom. Il. 5.333).

2 In Greek, "Kome," the name of the city being "Komana," or, translated into English, "Comana."

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 English (H.C. Hamilton, Esq., W. Falconer, M.A., 1903)
load focus Greek (1877)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

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

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (4 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: