Kitap 8
7.2
Others deny this, and transfer to Helice the proofs alleged of the bull and the sacrifice, asserting that these things were done there by established custom, and that the poet drew his comparison from the festival celebrated there. HeliceAelian, De Naturâ Anim. b. ii. c. 19, and Pausanias, b. vii. c. 24, 25, give an account of this catastrophe, which was preceded by an earth. quake, and was equally destructive to the city bura. B. C, 373. was overwhelmed by the waves two years before the battle of Leuctra. Eratosthenes says, that he himself saw the place, and the ferrymen told him that there formerly stood in the strait a brazen statue of Neptune, holding in his hand a hippocampus,The Syngathus Hippocampus of Linnaeus, from ἵππος, a horse, and κάμπη, a caterpillar. It obtained its name from the supposed resemblance of its head to a horse and of its tail to a caterpillar. From this is derived the fiction of sea-monsters in attendance upon the marine deities. It is, however, but a small animal, abundant in the Mediterranean. The head, especially when dried, is like that of a horse. Pliny, b. xxxii. c. 9–11. Aelian, De Nat. Anim. b. xiv. c. 20. an animal which is dangerous to fishermen.
