Pausanias Analysis

After crossing the Asopus and going about ten stades from the city, one finds the ruins of Potniae, and within them is a grove sacred to Demeter and Kore. The images of the goddesses are named after the river that runs near Potniae. At a prescribed time, the inhabitants perform certain other established rites, among which is the practice of releasing young pigs into a place they call the Megaron ("sanctuary"). Regarding these pigs, it is said that in the following season of the year at Dodona—on what account another person elsewhere might be convinced—they appear.

Here too there is a temple of Dionysus "Aigobolos" (Goat-slayer). For once, while sacrificing to the god, the worshippers became so drunken they were driven into reckless violence and even killed the priest of Dionysus. Immediately after having committed this murder, a contagious plague struck them, and an oracle came from Delphi that their cure was to sacrifice to Dionysus a beautiful boy. But not many years later, the god replaced the boy as their sacrificial offering with a goat. At Potniai there is also shown a well, whose water, they say, causes madness to the native horses that drink from it.

As you travel from Potniae toward Thebes, there is on the right side of the road an enclosure that is not large, containing pillars within it. There, they say, the earth opened to receive Amphiaraüs, adding further this tradition, that no birds perch upon these columns, nor does any grass grow there, nor do animals, either domestic or wild, graze upon the spot.

For the Thebans, within the circuit of the ancient wall, there were seven gates in number, and they remain even to our own time. As I learned, their names were derived for them partly from Electra, the sister of Cadmus, and partly from Proetus, a local man. But it proved difficult to discover the epoch of Proetus or the facts about his earlier lineage. The Neistan gates, they say, got their name for the following reason: among the musical strings, they call the lowest one "Neate." This particular string, then, they claim Amphion discovered at these gates. But I have also heard another account, that Zethus, Amphion's brother, had a son named Neis, and that these gates were named Neistan after this Neis.

There are gates called Krenaean, and others named Highest (Hypsistai), for the following reason: near these Highest gates stands a sanctuary of Zeus surnamed Hypsistos (Most High). The gates beyond these they call the Ogygian, and the last gates are the Homoloian. It seemed to me that the Homoloian gates bore the most recent of these names, while the Ogygian were named from the earliest times.

They say the Homoloïdae received their name in the following way. After their defeat by the Argives in the battle at Glisas, most of them fled together with Laodamas, the son of Eteocles. Of these fugitives, a certain portion shrank from the journey to Illyria, and turning instead toward Thessaly, they occupied Homole, a region among the Thessalian mountains especially fertile and abundantly watered.

When Thersander, Polyneices' son, recalled them to their homeland, the gates through which they made their descent from Homole were called the Homoloidian Gates. For someone coming from Plataea, the entrance into Thebes is through the Electran Gates; it was here, they say, that Capaneus, son of Hipponous, while making an especially fierce assault against the wall, was struck down by a thunderbolt.