Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/317

 ARCADIA 301 Kyllene. Achaean cities, twelve in number at least, if not more, divided this long strip of land amongst them, from the mouth of the Larissus and the north-western Cape Araxus on one side, to the western boundary of the Sikyonian territory on the other. According to the accounts of the ancient legends and the belief of Herodotus, this territory had once been occupied by Ionian inhabitants whom the Achaeans had expelled. In making this journey, the traveller would have finished the circuit of Peloponnesus ; but he would still have left untrodden the great central region, inclosed between the territories just enumerated, approaching nearest to the sea on the borders of Triphylia, but never touching it anywhere. This region was Arcadia, possessed by inhabitants who are uniformly represented as all of one race, and all aboriginal. It was high and bleak, full of wild mountain, rock, and forest, and abounding, to a de- gree unusual even in Greece, with those land-locked basins from whence the water finds only a subterraneous issue. It was dis- tributed among a large number of distinct villages and cities. Many of the village tribes, the Maenalii, Parrhasii, Azanes, etc., occupying the central and the western regions, were num- bered among the rudest of the Greeks : but along its eastern frontier there were several Arcadian cities which ranked de- servedly among the more civilized Peloponnesians. Tegea, Man- tineia, Orchomenus, Stymphalus, Pheneus, possessed the whole eastern frontier of Arcadia from the borders of Laconia to those of Sikyon and Pellene in Achaia : Phigaleia at the south west- ern corner, near the borders of Triphylia, and Heraea, on the north bank of the Alpheius, near the place where that river quits Arcadia to enter the Pisatis, were also towns deserving of notice. Towards the north of this cold and thinly-peopled region, near Pheneos, was situated the small town of Nonakris, adjoining to which rose the hardly accessible crags where the rivulet of Styx ' 1 Herodot. vi. 74 ; Pausan. viii. 18, 2. See the description and print of the river Styx, and the neighboring rocks, in Fiedler's Reise dnrch Griechenland, rol. i. p. 400. lie describes a scene amids; these rocks, in 1826, when the troops of Ibrahim Pasha were in the Morea, which realizes the fearful pictures of war after the manner of the ancient Gauls, or Thracians. A crowd of five thou- sand Greeks, of every age and sex, had found she'ter in a grassy and bushy