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Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History / Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,' cover

Studies in Greek Scenery, Legend and History / Selected from His Commentary on Pausanias' 'Description of Greece,'

Chapter 67: LXV. — Aliphera.
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About This Book

This collection of concise sketches, drawn from the author's commentary on the ancient traveler Pausanias, offers on-the-spot descriptions of Greek landscape, ruins, sanctuaries, and local legends. Each chapter focuses on a particular site or region, combining topographical observation, architectural and artistic description, and summaries of associated myths and historical tradition. The author interweaves antiquarian detail with personal travel impressions, discussing temples, cult practices, notable monuments, and the surviving traces of classical antiquity, and provides contextual notes that guide readers through how landscape, legend, and history intersect across the Greek world.

LXV. Aliphera.—From the citadel, and indeed from the whole summit of the ridge, there is a glorious prospect over the valley of the Alpheus for miles and miles. All the mountains of northern Arcadia are spread out like a panorama; and through the broad valley that intervenes between them and the height on which we stand, the Alpheus is seen winding far away and far below. The air blows fresh and sweet on the height, and the peacefulness, the stillness, the remoteness from the world of this little mountain-citadel remind one irresistibly of Keats’s lines in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?