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But Damis began to bellow as if he had seen the dream himself, and tried to dissuade Apollonius from going any further, "Lest," he said, "we also like fishes get thrown out of our element and perish, and have to weep and wail in a foreign land. Nay, we may even get caught in a no win situation, and have to go down on our knees to some potentate or king, who will flout us as the dolphins did the fishes."
Then Apollonius laughed and said: "You've not become a philosopher yet, if you are afraid of this sort of thing. But I will explain to you the real drift of the dream. For this land of Cissia is habited by the Eretrians, who were brought up here from Euboea by Darius five hundred years ago, and they are said to have been treated at their capture like the fishes that we saw in the dream; for they were netted in, so they say, and captured one and all.
It would seem then that the gods are instructing me to visit them and tend their needs, supposing I can do anything for them. And perhaps also the souls of the Greeks whose lot was cast in this part of the world are enlisting my aid for their land. Let us then go and diverge from the highroad and ask only about the well, hard by where the settlement is."
Now this well is said to consist of a mixture of pitch and oil and water, and if you draw up a bucket and pour it out, these three elements divide and part themselves from one another.
That he really did visit Cissia, he himself acknowledges in a letter which he wrote to the sophist of Clazomenae; for he was so kind and loyal, that when he saw the Eretrians, he remembered the sophist and wrote to him an account of what he had seen, and of what he had done for them; and all through this letter he urges the sophist to take pity on the Eretrians, and prays him, every time that he is declaiming a discourse about them, not to deprecate even the shedding of tears over their fate.
24. And the record which Damis left about the Eretrians is in harmony with this. For they live in the country of the Medes, not far distant from Babylon, a day's journey for a fleet traveller; but their country is without cities; for the whole of Cissia consists of villages, except for a race of nomads that also inhabits it, men who seldom dismount from their horses. And the settlement of the Eretrians is in the centre of the rest, and the river is carried round it in a trench, for they say that they themselves diverted it round the village in order to form a rampart of defence against the barbarians of the country.
But the soil is drenched with pitch, and is bitter to plant in; and the inhabitants are very short lived, because the pitch in the water forms a sediment in most of their bowels. And they get their sustenance off a bit of rising ground on the confines of their village, where the ground rises above the tainted country; on this they sow their crops and regard it as their land.
And they say that they have heard from the natives that 780 of the Eretrians were captured, not of course all of them fighting men; for there was a certain number of women and old men among them; and there was, I imagine, a certain number of children too, for the greater portion of the population of Eretria had fled to Caphereus and to the loftiest peaks of Euboea. But anyhow the men who were brought up numbered about 400, and there were ten women perhaps; but the rest, who had started from Ionia and Lydia, perished as they were marching up.
And they managed to open a quarry on the hill; and as some of them understood the art of cutting stone, they built temples in the Greek style and a market-place large enough for their purpose; and they dedicated various altars, two to Darius, and one to Xerxes, and several to Daridaeus. But up to the time of Daridaeus, 88 years after their capture, they continued to write in the manner of the Greeks, and what is more, their ancient graves are inscribed with the legend: "So and so, the son of so and so." And though the letters are Greek, they said that they never yet had seen the like.
And there were ships engraved on the tombstones, to show that the various individuals had lived in Euboea, and engaged either in seafaring trade, or in that of purple, as sailors or as dyers; and they say that they read an Elegiac inscription written over the sepulchre of some sailors and seafarers, which ran thus:
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