previous next
[3] The majority were caught in the falling houses and annihilated, but as day returned some survivors dashed from the ruins and, when they thought they had escaped the danger, met with a greater and still more incredible disaster. For the sea rose to a vast height, and a wave towering even higher washed away and drowned all the inhabitants and their native lands as well. Two cities in Achaia bore the brunt of this disaster, Helice and Bura,1 the former of which had, as it happened, before the earthquake held first place among the cities of Achaia.

1 See Strabo 1.3.18: "Then there are Bura and Helice; Bura disappeared in a chasm of the earth, and Helice was wiped out by a wave from the sea" (H. L. Jones, L.C.L.). These cities are in Achaia, Helice east of Aegium on the Corinthian Gulf and Bura inland. It is strange that no mention occurs of Delphi if the same earthquake caused the fire of 373 (Marm. Par. 71; Dittenberger (3), 295; Hommolle, Bull. Corr. Hell. 20 (1896), 677 ff.)

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Dates (automatically extracted)
Sort dates alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a date to search for it in this document.
1896 AD (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: