And they derive their names
from the mother; wherein they agree with the Lycians, whether being
a colony of the Lycians, or the Lycians a colony of theirs, Phanes
could not give me to understand. But, whereas they are black and
the Lycians are white, I rather believe that one of them has
learned this custom from the other; for anything might happen in
the past of time.
The Amagardoi have also this custom, such as we know of none other
people; that they slay strangers by crowning them with amphorae,
having made them red-hot. Now, having taken Phanes, they were
about to crown him on this wise, when there appeared among them a
veiled woman, very tall and goodly, whom they conceive to be a
goddess and worship. By her was Phanes delivered out of their
hands; and "she kept him in her hollow caves having a desire that
he should be her lover," as Homer says in the Odyssey, if the
Odyssey be Homer's. And Phanes reports of her that she is the most
beautiful woman in the world, but of her coming thither, whence she
came or when, she would tell him nothing. But he swore to me, by
him who is buried at Thebes (and whose name in such a matter as
this it is not holy for me to utter), that this woman was no other
than Rhodopis the Thracian. For there is a portrait of Rhodopis in
the temple of Aphrodite in Naucratis, and, knowing this portrait
well, Phanes recognised by it that the woman was Rhodopis.
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