Book 8
29.4
But when the old bed had dried up, an earthenware coffin more than eleven cubits long was found in it, and the corpse was proportionately large, and human in all parts of its body. This corpse the god in Clarus, when the Syrians came to his oracle there, declared to be Orontes, and that he was of Indian race. If it was by warming the earth of old when it was still wet and saturated with moisture that the sun made the first men, what other land is likely to have raised men either before India or of greater size, seeing that even to-day it still breeds beasts monstrous in their weird appearance and monstrous in size?
29.5
Some ten stades distant from the place named Depth is what is called Basilis. The founder of it was Cypselus, who gave his daughter in marriage to Cresphontes, the son of Aristomachus. To-day Basilis is in ruins, among which remains a sanctuary of Eleusinian Demeter. Going on from here you will cross the Alpheius again and reach Thocnia, which is named after Thocnus, the son of Lycaon, and to-day is altogether uninhabited. Thocnus was said to have built the city on the hill. The river Aminius, flowing by the hill, falls into the Helisson, and not far away the Helisson falls into the Alpheius.
