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[1] After the death of Nyktimos, Arkas the son of Kallisto came to the throne. He introduced the cultivation of crops, which he learned from Triptolemos, and taught men to make bread, to weave clothes, and other things besides, having learned the art of spinning from Adristas. After this king the land was called Arcadia instead of Pelasgia and its inhabitants Arcadians instead of Pelasgians.
[2] His wife, they said, was no mortal woman but a Dryad nymph. For they used to call some nymphs Dryads, others Epimeliads, and others Naiads, and Homer in his poetry talks mostly of Naiad nymphs. This nymph they call Erato, and by her they say that Arkas had Azan, Apheidas and Elatos. Previously he had had Autolaos, an illegitimate son.
[3] When his sons grew up, Arkas divided the land between them into three parts, and one district was named Azania after Azan; from Azania, it is said, settled the colonists who dwell about the cave in Phrygia called Steunos and the river Pencalas. To Apheidas fell Tegea and the land adjoining, and for this reason poets too call Tegea “the lot of Apheidas.”
[4] Elatos got Mount Cyllene, which down to that time had received no name. Afterwards Elatos migrated to what is now called Phokis, helped the people of Phokis when hard pressed in war by the Phlegyans, and became the founder of the city Elateia. It is said that Azan had a son Kleitor, Apheidas a son Aleus, and that Elatos had five sons, Aipytos, Pereus, Cyllen, Ischys, and Stymphalos.
[5] On the death of Axan, the son of Arkas, athletic contests were held for the first time; horse races were certainly held, but I cannot speak positively about other contests. Now Kleitor the son of Azan dwelled in Lykosoura, and was the most powerful of the kings, founding Kleitor, which he named after himself; Aleus held his father’s portion.
[6] Of the sons of Elatos, Cyllen gave his name to Mount Cyllene, and Stymphalos gave his to the spring and to the city Stymphalos near the spring. The story of the death of Ischys, the son of Elatos, I have already told in my history of Argolis.
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Pereus, they say, had no male child, but only a daughter, Neaera. She married Autolycus (Autolykos), who lived on Mount Parnassus, and was said to be a son of Hermes, although his real father was Baedalion.
[7] Kleitor, the son of Azan, had no children, and the sovereignty of the Arcadians devolved upon Aipytos, the son of Elatos. While out hunting, Aipytos was killed, not by any of the more powerful beasts, but by a seps that he failed to notice. This species of snake I have myself seen. It is like the smallest kind of adder, of the color of ash, with spots dotted here and there. It has a broad head and a narrow neck, a large belly and a short tail. This snake, like another called
cerastes (“the horned snake”), walks with a sidelong motion, as do crabs.
[8] After Aipytos Aleus came to the throne. For Agamedes and Gortys, the sons of Stymphalos, were three generations removed from Arkas, and Aleus, the son of Apheidas, two generations. Aleus built the old sanctuary in Tegea of Athena Alea, and made Tegea the capital of his kingdom. Gortys the son of Stymphalos founded the city Gortys on a river which is also called after him. The sons of Aleus were Lycurgus (Lykourgos), Amphidamas and Cepheus; he also had a daughter Auge.
[9] Hecataeus says that this Auge used to have intercourse with Hēraklēs when he came to Tegea. At last it was discovered that she had borne a child to Hēraklēs, and Aleus, putting her with her infant son in a chest, sent them out to sea. She came to Teuthras, lord of the plain of the Kaïkos, who fell in love with her and married her. The tomb of Auge still exists at Pergamon above the Kaïkos; it is a mound of earth surrounded by a basement of stone and surmounted by a figure of a naked woman in bronze.
[10] After the death of Aleus Lycurgus (Lykourgos) his son got the kingdom as being the eldest; he is notorious for killing, by treachery and riot in fair fight, a warrior called Areithous. Of his two sons, Ankaios and Epokhos, the latter fell ill and died, while the former joined the expedition of Jason to Kolkhis; afterwards, while hunting down with Meleagros the Calydonian boar, he was killed by the brute.
Description of Greece. Pausanias. ed. W. H. S. Jones, ed. H. A. Ormerod, ed. Gregory Nagy. . .