1907.] AND CONTRACTION OF THE EARTH. 295 



" 2. The destruction of Helice took place when Astius was archon at 

 Athens, in the fourth year of the hundred and first Olympiad, in which Damon 

 of Thurii was victorious for the first time. As none of the inhabitants sur- 

 vived, the territory now belongs to ^gium. . . . 



"5. Returning from Cerynea to the high road, vand proceeding a little 

 way along it, we turn off a second time from the sea to the right in order 

 to reach Bura. The town stands on a mountain. They gave it the name of 

 a woman, Bura, whose father was Ion, son of Xuthus, and whose mother was 

 Helice. When the god blotted out Helice from among men, Bura also was 

 overtaken by a severe earthquake which spared not even the ancient images 

 in the sanctuaries. Such people as chanced at the time to be away at the 

 wars or on other business were the only survivors, and they rebuilt Bura. 

 There is here a temple of Demeter, another of Aphrodite and Dionysus, and 

 another of Illithyia. The images are of Pentelic marble, and are works of 

 Eluclides, an Anthenian. The image of Demeter is clothed. There is also 

 a sanctuary of Isis. 



" Having descended from Bura in the direction of the sea, we come to 

 a river named Buraicus and to a small image of Hercules in a grotto. This 

 image is also surnamed Buraicus, and there is a mode of divination by means 

 of dice and a tablet. The person who inquires of the god prays before the 

 image, and after praying he takes four dice and throws them on the table. 

 Each die has a certain figure marked on it, and the meaning of each figure is 

 explained on the tablet. 



"The straight road from Helice to the Hercules is about thirty furlongs. 

 Going on from the Hercules you come to the mouth of a river which comes 

 down from a mountain in Arcadia, and never dries up. The river is called 

 the Crathis, and Crathis, too, is the name of the mountain which are its 

 springs. From this Crathis the river beside Crotona in Italy got its name. 

 On the bank of the Achaean Crathis once stood the city of ^gae; they say 

 that in course of time it was deserted by its inhabitants, because they were 

 a feeble folk." 



In his excellent and lucid commentary on Pausanias' " Descrip- 

 tion of Greece," Frazer says of Bura: 



"Between the Bouphousia (Cerynites) and Kalavryta (Buraicus) rivers 

 there rises a massive hill, which falls away on the south and west in a line 

 of stupendous precipices. This is the hill or mountain of Bura; it is now 

 called by the natives Idra. On the north the hill is separated from the sea 

 by a strip of level coast land; on the southern side it is connected by a neck 

 or saddle (which is, however, far below the summit of the hill) with the 

 loftier mountains which begin here and stretch away into Arcadia. On 

 this neck or saddle are the remains of Bura. They consist of extensive, 

 though insignificant, remains of walls and foundations, spread along the 

 southern part of the western foot of the hill as far as the copious spring 

 which gushes from the bottom of the precipice. Among the ruins is a 

 chapel of St. Constantine, which presumably occupies the site of an ancient 

 sanctuary. Mixed with the ruins are huge blocks of rock which appear to 

 have been hurled from the beetling crag above by an earthquake, perhaps 

 the same earthquake which destroyed the cit3^ 



