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[1] The marketplace is in shape very like a brick, and in it is a temple of Aphrodite called “in brick,” with a stone image. There are two slabs; on one are represented in relief Antiphanes, Crisus, Tyronidas and Pyrrhias, who made laws for the Tegeans, and down to this day receive honors for it from them. On the other slab is represented Iasios, holding a horse, and carrying in his right hand a branch of palm. It is said that Iasios won a horse-race at Olympia, at the time when Hēraklēs the Theban celebrated the Olympian festival.
[2] The reason why at Olympia the victor receives a garland of wild-olive I have already explained in my account of Elis;
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why at Delphi the garland is of bay I shall make plain later.
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At the Isthmus the pine, and at Nemeā celery became the prize to commemorate the sufferings of Palaimon and Arkhemoros. At most games, however, is given a garland of palm, and at all a palm is placed in the right hand of the victor.
[3] The origin of the custom is said to be that Theseus, on his return from Crete, held games in Delos in honor of Apollo, and garlanded the victors with palm. Such, it is said, was the origin of the custom. The palm in Delos is mentioned by Homer in the passage
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where Odysseus supplicates the daughter of Alkinoos.
[4] There is also an image of Ares in the marketplace of Tegea. Carved in relief on a slab it is called Gynaecothoenas (He who entertains women). At the time of the Laconian war, when Kharillos king of Lacedaemon made the first invasion, the women armed themselves and lay in ambush under the hill they call today Phylactris (Sentry Hill). When the armies met and the men on either side were performing many remarkable exploits,
[5] the women, they say, came on the scene and put the Lacedaemonians to flight. Marpessa, surnamed Choera, surpassed, they say, the other women in daring, while Kharillos himself was one of the Spartan prisoners. The story goes on to say that he was set free without ransom, swore to the Tegeans that the Lacedaemonians would never again attack Tegea, and then broke his oath; that the women offered to Ares a sacrifice of victory on their own account without the men, and gave to the men no share in the meat of the victim. For this reason Ares got his surname.
[6] There is also an altar of Zeus Teleios (Full-grown), with a square image, a shape of which the Arcadians seem to me to be exceedingly fond. There are also here tombs of Tegeates, the son of Lykaon, and of Maera, the wife of Tegeates. They say that Maera was a daughter of Atlas, and Homer makes mention of her in the passage
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where Odysseus tells to Alkinoos his journey to Hades, and of those whose ghosts he beheld there.
[7] The Tegeans surname Eileithuia, a temple of whom, with art image, they have in their marketplace, Auge on her knees, saying that Aleus handed over his daughter to Nauplios with the order to take and drown her in the sea. As she was being carried along, they say, she fell on her knees and so gave birth to her son, at the place where is the sanctuary of Eileithuia. This story is different from another, that Auge was brought to bed without her father’s knowing it, and that Telephus was exposed on Mount Parthenios, the abandoned child being suckled by a deer. This account is equally current among the people of Tegea.
[8] Close to the sanctuary of Eileithuia is an altar of Earth, next to which is a slab of white marble. On this is carved Polybius, the son of Lykortas, while on another slab is Elatos, one of the sons of Arkas.
Description of Greece. Pausanias. ed. W. H. S. Jones, ed. H. A. Ormerod, ed. Gregory Nagy. . .