This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[4]
Adjacent to Methone1 is Acritas,2 which is the beginning of the Messenian Gulf. But this is also called the Asinaean Gulf, from Asine, which is the first town on the gulf and bears the same name as the Hermionic town.3 Asine, then, is the beginning of the gulf on the west, while the beginning on the east is formed by a place called Thyrides,4 which borders on that part of the Laconia of today which is near Cynaethius and Taenarum.5 Between Asine and Thyrides, beginning at Thyrides, one comes to Oetylus (by some called Baetylus 6); then to Leuctrum, a colony of the Leuctri in Boeotia; then to Cardamyle, which is situated on a rock fortified by nature; then to Pherae,7 which borders on Thuria and Gerena, the place from which Nestor got his epithet "Gerenian," it is said, because his life was saved there, as I have said before.8 In Gerenia is to be seen a temple of Triccaean Asclepius, a reproduction of the one in the Thessalian Tricca. It is said that Pelops, after he had given his sister Niobe in marriage to Amphion, founded Leuctrum, Charadra, and Thalami (now called Boeoti), bringing with him certain colonists from Boeotia. Near Pherae is the mouth of the Nedon River; it flows through Laconia and is a different river from the Neda. It9 has a notable temple of Athena Nedusia. In Poeäessa,10 also, there is a temple of Athena Nedusia, named after some place called Nedon, from which Teleclus is said to have colonized Poeäessa and Echeiae11 and Tragium.
1 Strabo means the territory of Methone (as often).
2 Now Cape Gallo.
3 The Hermionic Asine was in Argolis, southeast of Nauplia (see Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. "Asine").
4 See footnote on "Thyrides," 8. 5. 1.
5 See Map IX in Curtius' Peloponnesos at the end of vol. ii.
6 Or "Boetylus" (see critical note on opposite page.)
7 Now Kalamata.
8 8. 3. 28.
9 "It" can hardly refer to Pherae, for Pausanias appears not to have seen, or known of, a temple of Athena there. Hence Strabo seems to mean that there was such a temple somewhere else, on the banks of the river Nedon (now River of Kalamata). The site of the temple is as yet unkown (see Curtius, Peloponnesos ii., p. 159).
10 "Poeässsa" is otherwise unknown. Some of the MSS. spell the name "Poeëessa" in which case Strabo might be referring to the "Poeëessa" in the island of Ceos: "Near Poeëessa, between the temple" (of Sminthian Apollo) "and the ruins of Poeëessa, is the temple of Nedusian Athena, which was founded by Nestor when he was on his return from Troy" (10. 5. 6). But it seems more likely that the three places here mentioned as colonized by Teleclus were all somewhere in Messenia.
11 Otherwise unknown.
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.