Listed 3 sub titles with search on: Information about the place for destination: "LIVITHRES Ancient city PIERIA".
(ta Leibethra or Libethra). A city of Macedonia, situated, according to Pausanias, on the declivity of Olympus, and not far from the tomb of Orpheus. An oracle declared that when the sun beheld the bones of the poet the city should be destroyed by a boar (hupo suos). The inhabitants of Libethra ridiculed the prophecy as a thing impossible; but the column of Orpheus's monument having been accidentally broken, a gap was made by which light broke in upon the tomb, when the same night the torrent named Sus, being prodigiously swollen, rushed down with violence from Mount Olympus upon Libethra, overthrowing the walls and all the public and private edifices, and every living creature in its furious course. Whether Libethra recovered from the devastation occasioned by this inundation is not stated in any writer, but its name occurs in Livy as a town in the vicinity of Dium before the battle of Pydna. It would seem that the name of Libethrius was given to the summit of Olympus, which stood above the town, and probably transferred thence to the Boeotian Mountains, afterwards styled Libethrius Mons. Hence the muses were surnamed Libethrides as well as Pierides.
This extract is cited Sep 2002 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
Libethrum, Eth. Libethrios. A town of Macedonia in the neighbourhood
of Dium. It is mentioned by Livy (xliv. 5), who, after describing the perilous
march of the Roman army under Q. Marcius through a pass in the chain of Olympus,
- Callipeuce (the lower part of the ravine of Platamona), - says, that after four
days of extreme labour, they reached the plain between Libethrum and Heracleia.
Pausanias (ix. 30. § 9) reports a tradition that the town was once destroyed.
Libethra, he says, was situated on Mount Olympus, on the side of Macedonia. At
no great distance from it stood the tomb of Orpheus, respecting which an oracle
had declared that when the sun beheld the bones of the poet the city should be
destroyed by a boar (hupo suos). The inhabitants of Libethra ridiculed the thing
as impossible; but the column of Orpheus's monument having been accidentally broken,
a gap was made by which light broke in upon the tomb, when the same night the
torrentnamed Sus, being prodigiously swollen, rushed down with violence from Mt.
Olympus upon Libethra, overthrowing the walls and all the public and private buildings,
and destroying every living creature in its furious course. After this calamity
the remains of Orpheus were removed to Dium, 20 stadia distant from their city
towards Olympus, where they erected a monument to him, consisting of an urn of
stone upon a column. In the time of Alexander the Great there was a statue of
Orpheus made of cypress, at Libethra. (Plut. Alex. 14.)
The only two torrents which could have effected such havoc as that
described by Pausanias are the rivers of Platamona and Litokhoro. As the former
was near Heracleia, it may be concluded that the Sus, was the same river as the
Enipeus, and that Libethra was situated not far from its junction with the sea,
as the upper parts of the slope towards Litokhoro, are secured from the ravages
of the torrent by their elevation above its bank.
It might be supposed, from the resemblance, that the modern Malathria
is a corruption of the ancient Libethra: the similarity is to be attributed, perhaps,
to the two names having a common origin in some word of the ancient language of
Macedonia.
Strabo (ix., x.) alludes to this place when speaking of Helicon, and
remarks that several places around that mountain, attested the former existence
of the Pierian Thracians in the Boeotian districts. Along with the worship of
the Muses the names of mountains, caves, and springs, Were transferred from Mt.
Olympus to Helicon; hence they were surnamed Libethrides as well as Pierides (
Nymphae, noster amor, Libethrides, Virg. Eel. vii. 21).
This text is from: Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854) (ed. William Smith, LLD). Cited June 2004 from The Perseus Project URL below, which contains interesting hyperlinks
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