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Pheneus and the Pheneatiké

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

John ff. Baker-Penoyre
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Extract

At three o'clock on the afternoon of July 6th, 1901, I stood at the extreme edge of the col between Mount Skipieza and Mount Saïta, staring with a mixture of incredulity, irritation, and interest at the scene before me. Where I had expected to see the lake of Pheneus, a blue expanse of twenty-five square miles of water, there lay a fertile stretching plain, for the most part a blaze of golden corn, while here and there a white point of light shewed where a fustanella'd harvester was at his peaceful toil. Nearer, the corn gave place to an ugly foreground of sun-cracked clay, while just at my feet, stretching from side to side of the narrowing valley, lay a mere ribbon of slate-coloured water—all that is left of the lake of Pheneus to-day.

I knew that such changes in its condition had been noted by travellers from Pausanias downwards, but this last and I believe final disappearance of the historic lake seems to have passed without notice in Athens and elsewhere.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Hellenic Studies , Volume 22 , November 1902 , pp. 228 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1902

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References

1 From a supposed similarity of names, Leake, (Travels in Morea, iii. 142, 151)Google Scholar and most subsequent writers identify the ancient Sciathis with the modern Saïta and consequently the ancient Oryxis with the modern Skipieza. Curtius, (Peloponnesus, i. p. 187Google Scholar) transposes these identifications, thinking that Oryxis must mean the ‘mountain of the canal,’ i.e. the mountain containing the S.W. Katavothra to which the canal or causeway of Herakles led. This seems in itself probable, and if Saïta, like the other mountains' names of the district, e.g. Zereia and Skipieza, is a Sclav word, it would hardly be a corruption of Sciathis.

2 Possibly Olbios may have been the name of the Zarouchla tributary. The Anias of Strabo, (Geographica, viii. 389Google Scholar) may be only a blunder for Aroanios.

2b The ancient Caryae is at the south of the lake. See below.

3 Leake, , Travels in the Morea, vol. iii. p. 155Google Scholar.

4 Philippson, A., Peloponnesus, vol. ii. p. 493Google Scholarsqq.

4a From Mr. J. H. Hopkinson who visited the Pheneatiké at this date.

4b Partly no doubt from the fluctuating level of the lake from which it has been calculated.

4c I am also indebted to him for the other photograph (Fig. 3) which gives a general view of the lake recalling something of the charm of this Arcadian Switzerland. The women in the foreground are digging gypsum.

5 Leake, , Travels in the Morea, vol. iii. p. 150Google Scholar.

6 Other possible indications of this are the absence of fish in the lake and of any kind of aquatic tradition among the inhabitants.

7 Another explanation was devised by Clark, W. G. (Peloponnesus, p. 318Google Scholar) who thought that the line merely shewed the juncture of two geological strata, but this seems to me impossible owing to its length and absolutely even level. Philippson also, who writes with geological knowledge, is quite clear as to the line being a water-line. Clark is right however in saying that the lines do not appear at the north end of the lake.

8 Curtius, , Peloponnesus, vol. i. p. 188Google Scholar.

9 Pausanias, viii. 14.

10 Bursian, , Geographie von Griechenland, ii. p. 199Google Scholar.

10b He would not be less appropriate in his Arcadian character of the νόμιος θєὸς. See next footnote.

11 Il. ii. 605. οἳ Φένεόν τ᾿ ἐνέμοντο καὶ ᾿ Ορχομενὸν πολύuηλον Homer's epithet wears well. I gratefully remember a stirrup cup of sheep's milk given me by shepherds on Orchomenus when leaving for Pheneus.

12 Virgil, , Aen. viii. 165Google Scholar. Another survival of the Trojan connection with Pheneus is the burial-place of Anchises in the low ridge which separates the plains of Mantineia and Orchomenus.

13 As the name Pheneus is somewhat loosely used by several writers, I append a list of the localities which have at one time or other borne the name.

(i) The whole district of lake or plain with the hamlets on the enclosing mountains. This was called Φενεατική or Φενεα̑τις or Φενική in antiquity, and is to-day the δη̑̑μος Φενεου̑̑

(ii) The citadel on the conical hill jutting out into the lake at its northern angle. This was the acropolis described by Pausanias. It was inhabited until the eighteenth-century inundations.

(iii) The district near the lake bed at the foot of this hill. This was the πόλις described by Pausanias. Close to it is the modern village Καλύβια, which is, I believe, to bear in future the official name Φєνєός.

(iv) The modern village of Φονία. This, with the adjacent hamlet of Βίλια overlooks the ancient citadel from the southern slope of Mt. Dourdoubana.

14 Polybius, , Histor. Reliqu. iv. 11Google Scholar, mentions the failure of an Achaean army to hold the pass between Stymphalus and Orchomenus in 221 B.C., and (iv. 70) gives an account of the successful passage of a Macedonian force in B.C. 218 through the same pass in the middle of the winter.

15 Theophrastus, , Hist. Plant. iii. 1Google Scholar.

16 Strabo, , Geographica, viii. 389Google Scholar.

17 This connection cannot be disputed. The necessity for an outlet of so considerable a stream as is inhumed at the Katavothra, the respective positions of this and of the Ladon spring, lying six miles apart, with a fall of about 850 feet between the two, and the correspondence between the diminution of the lake and the increase of the stream make this connection clear. Cf. Ross, L., Reisen…durch Griechenland, p. 107Google Scholar. Cf. also Frazer, , Pausanias, iv. p. 263Google Scholar.

18 Plutarch, De sera numinis vindicta, xii.

19 Aelian, , De nat. anim., iii. 58Google Scholar.

20 Pliny, , Nat. Hist., xxxi. 54Google Scholar.

21 Pausanias, viii. 14, 1–3.

22 I am not surprised that this should be the case when I remember my utter failure to extract local information worth the name about the last disappearance of the lake, which cannot have happened more than three or four years before my visit. But cf. the table at the end of this paper.

23 Pausanias, viii. 44, 5. Frazer, , Pausanias, iv. p. 419Google Scholar.

24 I should imagine that the Pheneatiké when once its barrier of mountains is passed is much to-day what it has always been. The good Hegoumenos of Hagios Georgios shewed me with pride a dusty collection of the visiting cards of chance travellers—scarcely one for a decade of years. I can call to mind no other part of Europe where life has gone on through the centuries with seemingly so little change, so little interrujition from the outside world.

25 The Peloponnesus, G. and L. Valk, Amsterdam, 1690.

26 Id. M. Seutter, Augsburg, 1720. Both these are in the British Museum. My faith in maps as contemporary evidence has however been shaken. The largest and most expensive of modern guides to Greece, published with all the resources of easy communication and travel at its command, gives in its 1901 edition a brilliant blue lake of some 25 square miles in extent where no lake exists at all. Nimium ne crede colori.

27 Bursian, , Geographie von Griechenland, ii. p. 200Google Scholar.

28 de Boblaye, Le Puillon, Recherches géographiques sur les ruines de la Morée, p. 153Google Scholar.

29 Neumann, C. und Partsch, J., Physikalische Geographie von Griechenland, p. 252Google Scholar.

30 Curtius, E., Peloponnesus, ii. p. 189Google Scholar.

31 Neumann and Partsch, loc. cit. give the depth of the waters as 252 metres.

32 One weak point of the story is that the present monastery of Hagios Georgios is obviously older than the date assigned to the inundation. The situation of this monastery is surely one of the most beautiful in Greece. A curved bastion of Mt. Crathis reaches out nearly to the lake, rising out of an undulating mass of plane-trees, cypresses, and poplars, broken here and there by the scattered fields of the monastery, the irregular red-tiled roofs of which nestle high above under the very crest of the spur.

33 Μηλιαράκης, Ἀ.. Γεωγραφία τοῦ νομοῦ Ἀργολίδος καὶ Κορινθίας, p. 147Google Scholar.

34 Leake, , Travels in the Morea, vol. iii. p. 135Google Scholarsqq.

35 Dodwell, , Tour in Greece, vol. ii. pp. 436–441Google Scholar.

36 Gell, , Itinerary of the Morea, p. 151Google Scholarsqq. Journey in the Morea, p. 373 sqq. and Plate facing p. 380.

36b Neumann and Partsch, p. 252.

37 This seems on the face of it more likely than the local tradition to the effect that the placing of these gates was a final act of malice on the part of Drama Ali, and intended to cause the disaster that followed.

38 Carte de la Grèce‥… par les officiers du Corps d'État-Major. Paris, 1852.

38b Peloponnesus, p. 316.

39 Most of these have been already cited, but cf. also:—

Aldenhoven, F., Itineraire descriptif de l' Attigue, p. 295Google Scholarsqq.

Vischer, W., Erinnerungen.… aus Griechenland, p. 494Google Scholarsqq.

Welcker, G. F., Tagbuch einer griechischen Reise, p. 302Google Scholarsqq.

Beulé, E., Études sur le Péloponnèse, p. 147Google Scholarsqq.

40 Frazer, J. G., Pausanias's description of Greece, iv. 230Google Scholarsqq.

41 My observations on the spot were unfortunately but unavoidably very incomplete.

42 I learn this from my friend Mr. Christos Lazaropoulos of Levidi near Orchomenos, who since this paper was written was so kind as to send me further particulars. The last disappearance of the lake was, as before, due to natnral causes, but steps are said to have been taken to keep the Katavothrae permanently open.