6
In this river there breeds a certain large fish, which by the natives is called Clupaea. This fish during the increase of the moon is white; but all the while the moon is in the wane, it is altogether black; and when it grows over bulky, it is (as it were) stabbed by its own fins. In the head of it is found a stone like a corn of salt, which, being applied to the left parts of the body when the moon is in the wane, cures quartan agues;—as Callisthenes the Sybarite tells us in the Thirteenth Book of Gallic Relations, from whom Timagenes the Syrian borrowed his argument.
6
Near to this river stands a mountain called Lugdunum, which changed its name upon this occasion. When Momorus and Atepomarus were dethroned by Seseroneus, in pursuance of the oracle’s command they designed to build a city upon the top of the hill. But when they had laid the foundations, great numbers of crows with their wings expanded covered all the neighboring trees. Upon which Momorus, being a person well skilled in augury, called the city Lugdunum. For lugdon in their language signifies a crow, and dunum Whence probably our English word down. any spacious hill.—This Clitophon reports, in his Thirteenth Book of the Building of Cities.
VII. PACTOLUS.
7
PACTOLUS is a river of Lydia, that washes the walls of Sardis, formerly called Chrysorrhoas. For Chrysorrhoas, the son of Apollo and Agathippe, being a mechanic artist, and one that only lived from hand to mouth upon his trade, one time in the middle of the night made bold to break open the treasury of Croesus; and conveying thence a good quantity of gold, he made a distribution of it to his family. But being pursued by the king’s officers, when he saw he must be taken, he threw himself into the river which was afterwards from his name called Chrysorrhoas, and afterwards changed into that of Pactolus upon this occasion.
