Kitap 13
2.5
In the strait between Asia and Lesbos there are about twenty small islands, but according to Timosthenes, forty. They are called Hecatonnesi, a compound name like Peloponnesus, the second letter n being customarily redundant in such compounds, as in the names Myonnesus, Proconnesus, and Halonnesus; and consequently we have Hecatonnesi, which means Apollonnesi, for Apollo is called Hecatus; for along the whole of this coast, as far as Tenedos, Apollo is highly honored, being called Sminthian or Cillaean or Grynian or by some other appellation. Near these islands is Pordoselene, which contains a city of the same name, and also, in front of this city, another island, larger and of the same name, which is uninhabited and has a temple sacred to Apollo.
2.6
Some writers, to avoid the indecency of the names, say that in this place we should read “Poroselene,” and that we should call Aspordenum, the rocky and barren mountain round Pergamum, “Asporenum,” and the temple of the Mother of the gods there the temple of the “Asporene” mother.i.e., they avoid “pord,” which, as also “perd,” is the stem of an indecent Greek word. What, then, shall we say of Pordalis and Saperdes and Perdiccas, and of the phrase of Simonides,banished, ‘pordacian’ clothes and all,instead of “wet” clothes, and, somewhere in the early comedy,the place is ‘pordacian,’that is, the place that is “marshy”? Lesbos is equidistant from Tenedos and Lemnos and Chios, one might say rather less than five hundred stadia.
