previous next
[5] Afterwards the dwellers around called the city Pytho, as well as Delphi, just as Homer1 so calls it in the list of the Phocians. Those who would find pedigrees for everything think that Pythes was a son of Delphus, and that because he was king the city was called Pytho. But the most widespread tradition has it that the victim of Apollo's arrows rotted here, and that this was the reason why the city received the name Pytho. For the men of those days used pythesthai for the verb “to rot,” and hence Homer in his poem says that the island of the Sirens was full of bones, because the men who heard their singing rotted (epythonto).

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 Greek (1903)
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.
Pytho (Greece) (3)
Delphi (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (2 total)
  • Commentary references to this page (1):
    • Thomas W. Allen, E. E. Sikes, Commentary on the Homeric Hymns, HYMN TO APOLLO
  • Cross-references in notes to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: