132 HISTORY OF GREECE. through Sisyphus and his sons. Pherekydes represented Neleus, king of Pylos, as having also been king of Orchoraenos. 1 In the region of Triphylia, near to or coincident with Pylos, a Minyeian river is mentioned by Homer ; and we find traces of residents called Minyaa even in the historical times, though the account given by Herodotus of the way in which they came thither is strange and unsatisfactory. 2 Before the great changes which took place in the inhabitants of Greece from the immigration of the Thesprotians into Thessaly, of the Boeotians into Boeotia, and of the Dorians and -ZEtolians into Peloponnesus, at a date which we have no means of deter mining, the Minyae and tribes fraternally connected with them seem to have occupied a large portion of the surface of Greece, from lolkos in Thessaly to Pylos in the Peloponnesus. The wealth of Orchomenos is renowned even in the Iliad ; 3 and when we study its topography in detail, we are furnished with a proba- ble explanation both of its prosperity and its decay. Orchome- nos was situated on the northern bank of the lake Kopai's, which receives not only the river Kephisos from the valleys of Phokis, but also other rivers from Parnassus and Helicon. The waters of the lake find more than one subterranean egress partly through natural rifts and cavities in the limestone mountains, partly through a tunnel pierced artificially more than a mile in length into the plain on the north-eastern side, from whence they flow into the Eubcean sea near Larymna r 4 and it appears 1 Pherekyd. Fragm. 56, Didot. We see by the !55th Fragment of the same author, that he extended the genealogy of Phryxos to Pherae in Thessaly. 2 Herodot. iv. 145. Strabo, viii. 337-347. Horn. Iliad, xi. 721. Pausan. v. 1, 7. TroTafibv Mivvqiov, near Elis. 3 Iliad, ix. 381. 4 See the description of these channels or Katabothra in Colonel Leakc's Travels in Northern Greece, vol. ii. c. 15, p. 281-293, and still more elabo- rately in Fiedler, Reise durch alle Theile des Konigreichs Griechenlands, Leipzig, 1840. He traced fifteen perpendicular shafts sunk for the purpose of admitting air intc the tunnel, the first separated from the last by about 5900 feet : they are now of course overgrown and stopped up (vol. i. p 115). Forchhammer states the length of this tunnel as considerably greater than what is here stated. He also gives a plan of the Lake Kopa'ts with the sui>
