ΠΡΟΧΕΙΡΟ

 

Preface   

 

Megarian Moments derives from an international workshop organized by the editors at 
McGill University in Montreal, May 5 to 6, 2016. The symposium was held under the aegis 
of the Parochial Polis Network which is dedicated to the study of localism in ancient Greece. 
The Parochial Polis explores what the local is and how it provides a frame of reference for 
human agency that is rich in orientation and meaning.  

From its inception in 2015, The Parochial Polis Network launched a plethora of workshops 
on localism and globalization in the ancient world. Several scholars from Megarian Moments 
played a key role in those conversations; some have pursued approximations to the local 
both within the Parochial Polis and beyond. The lively exchange subsequent to the workshop 
inspired an immensely fruitful research environment. In addition to the papers that were 
delivered in Montreal, the editors commissioned three articles from authors who had grown 
into the network to round off the picture. All of these steps, in addition to the improvements 
of manuscripts from the TSO peer review process, helped to forge this book. Incidentally, 
we are grateful and feel privileged to kick off this exciting new series with our volume.   

The workshop was made possible by the Anneliese Maier Research Prize that the Alexander 
von Humboldt Foundation awarded to Hans Beck. Megarian Moments thus benefitted again 
from the energetic, ongoing collaboration with Peter Funke of Münster University. 
Additional funds were received from the MacNaughton Chair of Classics at McGill. As ever, 
the team of young researchers and research assistants associated with the Parochial Polis 
helped with the planning and seamless carrying out of the event: Lexie Bilhete, Cyrena 
Gerardi, Émilie Lucas, Meghan Poplacean, Alex Martalogu, and Daniel Whittle. Émilie 
Lucas also shook her magic designer wand with the cover. Chandra Giroux served as 
editorial assistant to the volume. Christian Fron from Heidelberg drew the maps. Finally, 
Panagiota Avgerinou from the 3rd Ephorate of Classical Antiquities and Curator of the 
Museum in Megara generously advised us on the urban topography of the ancient city. To 
all we offer our heartfelt thanks.  

 HANS BECK, McGill University, Montreal – hans.beck@mcgill.ca  
 PHILIP J. SMITH, McGill University, Montreal – phil.smith@mcgill.ca 

 

Chapter  8    
 
DANIEL TOBER – Fordham University, New York City, New York 
dtober@fordham.edu 
 
Megarians’ Tears: Localism and Dislocation in the Megarika  

 
Those who weep through compulsion or without genuine emotion, explains the 
paremiographer Zenobios, shed ‘Megarians’ Tears’. He offers two etiologies, the first 
historical, the second horticultural (5.8):   

They say that Bakchios, a Corinthian, married the daughter of Klytios, king of 
the Megarians, and that when she died the Megarians were forced by Klytios to 
send young women and men to Corinth to mourn for his daughter. Others 
say, however, that a great deal of garlic is reputed to grow in the land of the 
Megarians, for which reason the proverb is applied to those who weep 
disingenuously, since those who have eaten a lot of garlic shed tears 
continuously from its pungency. So tears that come not from feelings nor from 
depth but from the surface they call ‘Megarians’ Tears’.1 


1 Μεγαρέων δάκρυα: αὕτη τέτακται ἐπὶ τῶν πρὸς βίαν δακρυόντων, καὶ μὴ ἐπὶ οἰκείῳ πάθει. Λέγουσι γὰρ Βάκχιόν 
τινα Κορίνθιον γῆμαι τὴν Κλυτίου τοῦ Μεγαρέων βασιλέως θυγατέρα· ἧς ἀποθανούσης, ἀναγκασθῆναι τοὺς 
Μεγαρέας ὑπὸ τοῦ Κλυτίου πέμπειν παρθένους καὶ ἠϊθέους εἰς Κόρινθον τοὺς μέλλοντας αὐτοῦ τὴν θυγατέρα 
καταθρηνήσειν. Οἱ δέ φασιν, ὅτι πλεῖστα δοκεῖ φύεσθαι ἐν τῇ Μεγαρέων σκόροδα· ἔνθεν τὴν παροιμίαν εἰρῆσθαι ἐπὶ 
τῶν προσποιητῶς δακρυόντων, παρόσον οἱ ἐμπιπλάμενοι τῶν σκορόδων ἀποδακρύουσι συνεχῶς ὑπὸ τῆς 
δριμύτητος. Ὅθεν τὰ μὴ ἐκ παθῶν μηδὲ ἐκ βάθους δάκρυα, ἀλλ’ ἐξ ἐπιπολῆς, Μεγαρέων δάκρυα ἔλεγον. 

Hans Beck and Philip J. Smith (editors). Megarian Moments. The Local World of an Ancient Greek City-State. 
Teiresias Supplements Online, Volume 1. 2018: 183-207. © Daniel Tober 2018. License Agreement: CC-BY-NC 
(permission to use, distribute, and reproduce in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed and 
not used for commercial purposes). 
 



Daniel Tober – Megarians’ Tears 
 

The expression serves as a good starting point for a study of Megarian local historiography 
not because it suggests the frustration that attends any scrutiny of the Megarika – the tears 
one sheds in trying to marshal these meager fragments are quite sincere – but rather 
because, together with Zenobios’s commentary, it helps to foreground two themes that 
recur with some frequency in Megarian cultural memory. On the one hand, tears: the 
Megarians’ constitutive narrative is punctuated by scenes of death, burial, and lamentation, 
forced or otherwise. On the other hand, tensions with nearby poleis: Megara framed its 
past to a large extent by its interactions with its neighbours, Corinth, along with Argos 
and Sikyon, on one side and Athens and Boiotia on the other. 

Zenobios, who compiled his three books of proverbs at Rome under the emperor Hadrian, 
offers one of the fullest but by no means the only explanation of ‘Megarians’ Tears’.2 Our 
earliest discussion comes, in fact, from the Atthidographer Demon,3 who wrote a 
compendium of proverbs around the end of the fourth century BCE and who interpreted 
another phrase, ‘Korinthos son of Zeus’, by drawing on a similar nexus of traditions as 
would Zenobios for ‘Megarians’ Tears’ (FGrH 327 F19).4 Megara was originally a colony 
of Corinth, Demon explained, and once so much under Corinthian sway that every time 
one of the Bacchiads died, Megarians were compelled to travel to Corinth and publicly 
grieve over the corpse. Gradually, however, the Megarians began to gain in strength and 

                                              

2 For Zenobios, whose collection of proverbs drew primarily on the earlier work of Loukillos of Tarrha and Didymos 
(Suda Z73), see Bühler 1987: 33-38. 
3 Indeed, the expression was itself probably Athenian in origin: a fragment, perhaps, of Attic comedy (Kock 1880: F872) 
related to what was perceived as manipulative yet ultimately bootless whining following Athenian legislation against 
Megara in the 430s BCE. 
4 = Schol. Pind., Nem. 7.155b: παροιμία ἐστὶν ἐπὶ τῶν τὰ αὐτὰ λεγόντων ὁ Διὸς Κόρινθος ..... δοκεῖ οὖν ἀπὸ τοιούτου 

τινὸς εἰρῆσθαι ἡ παροιμία· Μεγαρέας φασὶ Κορινθίων ἀποίκους, καὶ πολλὰ τοῖς Κορινθίοις κατ᾽ ἰσχὺν τῆς πόλεως 
ὑπείκειν. ἄλλα τε γὰρ πλείονα τοὺς Κορινθίους προστάσσειν, καὶ τῶν Βακχιαδῶν εἴ τις τελευτήσαι (διώικουν δὲ οὗτοι 
τὴν πόλιν), ἔδει Μεγαρέων ἄνδρας καὶ γυναῖκας ἐλθόντας εἰς Κόρινθον συγκηδεύειν τὸν νεκρὸν [τῶν Βακχιαδῶν]. ὡς 
δὲ ὕβρεως οὐδὲν ἀπέλειπον οἱ Κορίνθιοι, τὰ δὲ τῶν Μεγαρέων ἔρρωτο, †καὶ πρὸς ἐλπίσι τοῦ μηδὲν παθεῖν ἀποστάντας 
αὐτούς, ἀλλ᾽ ἀφεῖναι†, πέμπουσι δῆ<τα> πρέσβεις οἱ Κορίνθιοι κατηγορήσοντας τῶν Μεγαρέων, οἳ προσελθόντες εἰς 

τὴν ἐκκλησίαν ἄλλα τε πολλὰ διεξῆλθον καὶ τέλος ὅτι δικαίως <ἂν> στενάξειεν ἐπὶ τοῖς γενομένοις ὁ Διὸς Κόρινθος, εἰ 
μὴ λήψοιτο δίκην παρ᾽ αὐτῶν. ἐφ᾽ οἷς παροξυνθέντες οἱ Μεγαρεῖς τούς <τε> πρέσβεις <παραχρῆμα> λίθοις ἔβαλον· καὶ 
μετὰ μικρὸν ἐπιβοη<θη>σάντων τινῶν τοῖς Κορινθίοις, καὶ μάχης γενομένης νικήσαντες, φυγῇ τῶν Κορινθίων 
ἀποχωρούντων, ἐφεπόμενοι καὶ κτείνοντες ἅμα παίειν, <ἀλλήλοις> τὸν Διὸς Κόρινθος ἐκέλευον. ὅθεν φησὶν ὁ Δήμων, 
ἔτι καὶ νῦν ἐπὶ τῶν ἄγαν <μὲν ὑπὲρ>σεμνυνομένων, κακῶς <δὲ>καὶ δειλῶς ἀπαλλαττόντων, τὴν παροιμίαν ταύτην 
τετάχθαι. 

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Daniel Tober – Megarians’ Tears 
 

autonomy; and when the Corinthians complained – “Korinthos son of Zeus”, they said, 
would “sigh” at this new state of affairs –, the Megarians took a stand and drove their 
oppressors away, adding insult to injury in the ensuing battle by encouraging one another 
to attack and kill ‘Korinthos son of Zeus’. The expression that concerns Demon here has 
nothing strictly to do with Megara; already by the time of Pindar (Nem. 7.155b) it 
apparently referred to idle repetition or tiresome drivel, as if the Corinthians were known 
for belaboring the dubious divinity of their eponym.5 Yet Demon chose to expound 
‘Korinthos son of Zeus’ not simply through the obvious rubric of Corinth but by bringing 
Megara into the mix as well, by positing a period of Megarian subjugation and an uprising 
whose success was capped off by the commandeering of a Corinthian tag.6 In so doing, 
Demon highlights a common Megarian maneuver, or at any rate a maneuver commonly 
identified in Megarian tradition: the repackaging of outside and often hostile material (in 
this case the Corinthians’ taunt) for local use. 

The circumstances that Demon adduced to explain the forced weeping of the Megarians, 
we see, differ markedly from those later forwarded by Zenobios. In Zenobios’s account, 
the tears are compelled at the behest not of Corinthians but of the Megarians’ own king, 
the otherwise unknown Klytios. The variation offers us another example of Megarian 
appropriation, yet in this case of a different order; for here it is not the Megarians as 
protagonists who co-opt outside material but the paremiographer himself, taking initiative 
away from Corinth and assigning it to Megara. Zenobios’s contemporary Diogenianos 
also emphasized Megarian agency in his discussion of the proverb, but he took the process 
a step further, generalizing the scenario and relocating the action entirely to Megara. 
Whenever any Megarian king died, he reasoned, his wife would oblige the populace to 
grieve for him.7 Later Byzantine paremiologists took a different tack, with Photios and the 

                                              

5 For other explanations of ‘Korinthos son of Zeus’, see Zen. 3.21; Schol. Pind. Nem. 7.155a; Schol. Aristoph. Ran. 439; 
Schol. Pl. Euthyd. 292 (= Ephor. FGrH 70 F19); Pausan. Att. Δ17; Tim. Soph. Δ983a; and Suda Δ1207 (but cf. Suda O40). 
See the commentary of Jacoby 1954: 217-218. 
6 For the historicity of Corinthian rule over Megara, possible but by no means certain, see Hanell 1934: 75-91; Salmon 
1972: 197-198; Legon 1981: 60-70; and Parker, ‘Ephoros (70)’, commentary to F19, in BNJ. 
7 6.34: Μεγαρέων δάκρυα: ἐπὶ τῶν πρὸς βίαν δακρυόντων. Τοῦ βασιλέως αὐτῶν ἀποθανόντος ἠναγκάσθησαν πάντες 
ὑπὸ τῆς αὐτοῦ γυναικὸς δακρῦσαι. Ὁμοία τῇ, Πρὸς σῆμα μητρυιᾶς θρηνεῖν. 

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Suda removing the element of abasement altogether and linking the weeping solely to 
garlic, which the Megarid allegedly produced in spades.8  

Can we detect a gradual localization and adulteration of the explanations offered for 
‘Megarians’ Tears’ from Demon onwards, with a putative phase of foreign domination 
supplanted by the authority of local kings and an act of degradation by a harmless response 
to local crops?9 There are, of course, difficulties with using ‘Megarians’ Tears’ and its 
etiology to map the contours of Megarian cultural memory.10 Nevertheless, it is not 
unreasonable to see the Megarians as themselves partly responsible for effacing or 
reinterpreting an early period of dependence to Corinth, whatever its historicity, and even 
for obscuring the ignominy of forced weeping altogether. Just as the Megarians in 
Demon’s story seize upon the Corinthian slogan ‘Korinthos son of Zeus’ and turn it on its 
head, so too might the historical Megarians in and after the late fifth century BCE have 
reinterpreted insults about crocodile tears and garlic and repurposed slanderous rumors 
associated with these insults, with the resulting traditions eventually finding their way into 
Megarian local historiography and thence to Zenobios. It is just this sort of pirating and 
sanitizing of hostile traditions, after all, that Plutarch imputes to the Megarians; by 
whitewashing the character of Skiron, he remarks in his Life of Theseus, Megarian 

                                              

8 Phot. M172: ἐπεὶ πλεῖστα ἐν τῇ Μεγαρίδι σκόροδα φύεται, εἰς παροιμίαν ἦλθεν ἐπὶ τῶν προσποιητῶς δακρυόντων. 
Suda M383 (Adler): Μεγαρέων δάκρυα: ἐπεὶ πλεῖστα ἐν τῇ Μεγαρίδι σκόροδα φύεται, εἰς παροιμίαν ἦλθεν ἐπὶ τῶν 
προσποιητῶς καὶ πρὸς βίαν δακρυόντων, καὶ μὴ ἐπὶ οἰκείῳ πάθει. Μεγαρεύς, ἡ εὐθεῖα. See also Hesych. M484 and Mak. 
Chrysokeph. 5.88. 
9 This is essentially the assessment of van Wees (2003: 62-63), who suggests in his essay on helotage that “These later 
versions [of the explanation of ‘Megarians’ Tears’] are easily understood as attempts to clean up the earlier story, from a 
Megarian point of view, by removing the stigma of once having been so humiliated by their neighbours”; but cf. Salmon 
1972: 192 and Figueira 1985a: 264 (Diogenianos’s account, Figueira suggests, is not localizing but in fact ‘banalizing’ and 
“perhaps a result of careless abbreviation”).  
10 For one thing, the garlic is not purely a Byzantine addition; Zenobios, as we have seen, already mentions it as a 
possible culprit, and Megara’s special claim to the vegetable had been proposed as long ago as Aristophanes (e.g. Acharn. 
515-538 and 755-770). Not all late sources, moreover, prioritize the garlic to the exclusion of other explanations; in the 
fifteenth century, Michael Apostolius is still admitting that ‘Megarians’ Tears’ might have something to do with a dead 
Megarian king (11.10). Any hypothetical Megarian reaction to the story preserved by Demon about a period of 
Corinthian domination, finally, would surely have surfaced well before Zenobios, with changes in Megarian memory 
unlikely to have aligned themselves so neatly to the protracted development of the paremiology between Demon and 
Photios. 

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historians “attacked tradition” and “made war on the past” (Thes. 10):11 Skiron was not a 
highwayman, insist ‘the historians from Megara’, but a punisher of highwaymen (FGrH 
487 F1).12 It is perhaps no coincidence that the figure whom Plutarch, and indeed many 
subsequent discussions of Megarian tradition, tout as a symbol of Megarian revisionism is 
Skiron, that quintessential bandit, whose penchant was to rob those transiting the Megarid 
and hurl them into the sea.13  

Megarians would not be unusual either in generating an intentional history that reacted in 
some way to their neighbours or even in borrowing episodes wholesale from the cultural 
memory of other communities, like Corinth and Athens, and recasting them so as to 
emphasize local impetus and influence; it is never in a vacuum that a community 
constructs its past.14 Yet the Megarika and the local traditions on which they drew did take 
an idiosyncratic approach to this appropriation, I argue, relying less on outward aggression 
than on inward allure. Situated as it was, in the words of Stephanos of Byzantion, “on the 
isthmus between the Peloponnese on the one hand and Attica and Boiotia on the other,”15 
the Megarid engendered a community whose collective memory was itself isthmian: not 
only restricted by and responsive to the traditions originating from either side but also 
adept in capitalizing on its intermedial position. By magnetizing the Megarid, by pulling 
Argives, Sikyonians, Boiotians, and Athenians inwards and burying them in Megarian 
land, the Megarian community advertised its territory as a conduit for Greeks and a 
thoroughfare of central importance. Before we explore this particular property of 
Megarian localism in more detail, however, it will be useful to provide some background 
to the Megarika and their authors. 

 

                                              

11 = FGrH 487 F1: οἱ δὲ Μεγαρόθεν συγγραφεῖς ὁμόσε τῆι φήμῃ βαδίζοντες καὶ τῷ πολλῷ χρόνῳ κατὰ Σιμωνίδην 
πολεμοῦντες οὔθ᾽ ὑβριστὴν οὔτε ληιστὴν γεγονέναι τὸν Σκείρωνά φασιν ἀλλὰ ληιστῶν μὲν κολαστήν, ἀγαθῶν δὲ καὶ 
δικαίων οἰκεῖον ἀνδρῶν καὶ φίλον.  
12 οὔθ᾽ ὑβριστὴν οὔτε ληιστὴν γεγονέναι τὸν Σκείρωνά φασιν ἀλλὰ ληιστῶν μὲν κολαστήν. According to Pausanias, in 
fact, the Megarians believed that Skiron, the son of Pylas and son-in-law of Pandion, had challenged Nisos for kingship 
and ended up as Megara’s polemarch (1.39.6 [= FGrH 487 F3] and 1.44.6). 
13 For Skiron, see Hanell 1934: 40-48; Wickersham 1991: 18-22; and Higbie 1997: 5, 294-295. 
14 For the concept of ‘intentional history’, see Gehrke 2001; see also Gehrke 2003 and 2010. 
15 Steph. Byz. s.v. Megara. 

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The Megarika  

Modern students of the Megarika tend to take Plutarch’s lead in emphasizing the general 
reactivity of Megarian memory to foreign traditions and its affinity for plagiarism – 
without legends of their own, wrote Martin Vogt, Megarians resorted to “borrowing and 
stealing” from their neighbours16 –, as well as the significant role that Athens played in this 
dynamic. For Donald Prakken, the Megarika represented an ongoing “literary and 
historical polemic ... against Athens”;17 for Felix Jacoby, Megara was always struggling 
under the weight of Athens, continually on the defensive and relying, in the absence of 
real political power, on an overblown and fanciful chauvinism;18 and for Thomas J. 
Figueira, it was the ongoing conflict with Athens over the so-called Hiera Orgas that 
provided in the mid-fourth century BCE a “context for this intense Megarian effort to 
defend the honor of their community” through the writing of Megarika.19 Even Luigi 
Piccirilli’s landmark edition of the Megarika, which sought in part to wrest Megara’s 
historiography from Athens’ grasp,20 assigns the efflorescence of local historiography at 
Megara to a time of political decadence in the shadow of a culturally prestigious Athens.21 

As these studies make clear, it is difficult to avoid exaggerating Athens’ contribution to the 
construction of Megarian identity since so many of our sources about Megara are 
Athenian or at any rate focalized by Athens. Save for what little we can cull from the 
Theognidea,22 most of our earliest references to the Megarian past come down to us 
                                              

16 “Bei der Dürftigkeit der megarischen Sage und Geschichte war man aber darauf angewiesen, teils durch 
Anlehnungen und selbst durch Räubereien aus fremden Sagenkreisen, teils durch blanke Erfindungen die Bedeutung des 
Heimatlandes künstlich herauszuputzen: die Spuren dieser Ruhmredigkeit, die für die spätere Kleinstadt charakteristisch 
ist, haben wir in manchen sagenhaften und auch scheinbar historischen Berichten gefunden” (Vogt 1902: 743). 
According to Laqueur (1926: 1105), moreover, the work of the local historians at Megara, was “von vornherein stark 
unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Aussenpolitik gebildet”. 
17 Prakken 1944: 123. 
18 “Aber dann muss man auch die lächerliche seite dieses lokalpatriotismus einer stadt betonen, die schon im verlaufe des 
6. jhdts ihre alte bedeutung zu verlieren beginnt und sich literarisch immer in der verteidigungsstellung befindet. Es 
genügt auf die reihe der gräber zu verweisen, die Megara für sich beansprucht” (Jacoby 1955: 229 n.6; but cf. 389 for the 
influence of other communities on Megarian local historiography). 
19 Figueira 1985b: 119. 
20 Piccirilli 1975: v. 
21 op. cit., vi. 
22 We find, for example, an allusion in lines 773-782 to Alkathous’s wall effectively keeping the Persians at bay. Nothing 
survives from the other early Megarian poet, Philiadas, except an epitaph for the Thespians who died at Thermopylai. 

 

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embedded in Athenian cultural memory. Herodotus mentions Megara’s war with Athens 
over Salamis only in the context of Peisistratos’ coup (1.59.4), for example, and he dates the 
Dorian colonization of Megara in accordance to Athenian chronology, the kingship of 
Kodros (5.76).23 Thucydides, for his part, alludes to the tyrant Theagenes, but only so far as 
he impinges on Kylon’s revolt (1.126.3-11).24 Even later writers like Strabo (9.1.4-8) and 
Pausanias (1.40-44) append their accounts of Megara to their respective books on Attica,25 
while Plutarch, who does explicitly cite Megarian local historians, does so only in his Lives 
of the Athenians Solon and Theseus.26  

On occasion, our sources provide glimpses of connections to communities other than 
Athens. Hellanikos, for example, who notably wrote no separate work on Megara (as he 
had on Argos, Arkadia, Athens, Boiotia, Thessaly, and his own Lesbos),27 integrated 
elements of early Megarian history into his Deukalioneia (FGrH 4 F18)28 and treated the 
eponymous Megareus, whom he envisaged as a Boiotian, in his chronology framed by the 

                                                                                                                                                 

Hereas does quote an anonymous verse about the murder in Aphidna of Skiron’s son (FGrH 486 F2: τὸν ἐν εὐρυχόρῳ 

ποτ᾽ Ἀφίδνῃ / μαρνάμενον Θησεὺς ῾Ελένης ἕνεκ᾽ ἠυκόμοιο / κτεῖνεν), but Plutarch, who preserves the lines (Thes. 32.6-
7), tells us nothing about the provenance of the poet or the overall theme of the poem (see Hanell 1934: 11 n.2). 
23 Herodotus refers elsewhere to Megarians, both individually and en masse. Yet his unflattering treatment of the 
Megarians at Plataia (9.14, 21, 28.6, 31.5, 69.2, 85.2; cf. 8.1.1, 8.45, 8.74.2, and 9.1 for earlier Megarian contributions to 
the Greek defense) was surely affected by the anti-Megarianism to which he was exposed during his sojourn at Athens. 
24 Thucydides’ sources for the foundation of Megara Hyblaia and Selinous in Sicily by the Megarians Lamis and 
Pamillos (6.4) are not entirely clear (see Hornblower 2008: 272-278), but they were certainly not Megarian. For 
Thucydides’ failure to engage with Megara’s role in the early phases of the Peloponnesian War, see Rood 1998: 68-69, 
214-215. 
25 According to both writers, the Megarid was originally part of Attica (Strab. 9.1.5; Paus. 1.39.4), and even though, as 
we shall see, Pausanias retains local Megarian traditions, he sometimes sifts these through an Athenian sieve (see, for 
example, 1.5.3 and 1.39.4 on the tomb of Pandion). We should note, too, that Pausanias even blames Megara’s eventual 
decline in the Roman period on the assassination of the Athenian herald Anthemokritos in the fifth century (1.36.3)! 
26 Lyk. 1.8 = Dieuchidas FGrH 48 F5; Thes. 20 and 32.4 = Hereas FGrH 486 F1-2; Sol. 10 = FGrH 486 F4. It is at Thes. 
10, moreover, that Plutarch refers to ‘historians from Megara’ (= FGrH 487 F1; see also Perikl. 30.3 = FGrH 487 F13). It is 
noteworthy that Plutarch, critical though he is of Herodotus’s local biases, does not bother to challenge the depiction of 
the Megarians in the Histories (de Mal. Her. 872c). 
27 Ἀργολικά (FGrH 4 F36); Περὶ Ἀρκαδίας (F37, 161-162); Ἀτθίς (F38-49); Βοιωτιακά (F50-51); Θετταλικά (F52 and 
201); and Λεσβιακά (F33-5). 
28 = FGrH 4 T21 = FGrH 485 T1/F1 = Clem. Strom. 6.26.8. Hellanikos also mentioned Megara in his Atthis (FGrH 323a 
F7 = s.v. Pegai: Πηγαί. Ἀνδοκίδης ἐν τῷ Περὶ εἰρήνης [3.3], εἰ γνήσιος. Πηγαὶ τόπος ἐν Μεγάροις, ὡς ἐν δ̄ τῆς Ἀτθίδος 
φησὶν ῾Ελλάνικος). 

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Priestesses of Hera at Argos (FGrH 4 F78).29 But by and large it is Athens that sets the tone 
of ancient discussions about Megara, and these tend either to echo the anti-Megarianism 
of mid-fifth-century Athenian discourse or at any rate to ideate Megara in direct 
opposition to Athens. Thanks in part to the careers of notable Athenians like Plato, 
Androtion, and Leokrates,30 Megara even earned the reputation as a haven for Athenian 
exiles; the Cynic Teles, who evidently spent some time at Megara after the Chremonidean 
War, depicts in his treatise On Exile a Megarian countryside swollen with the graves of 
Athenian rejects (29h).31 It is no surprise that Teles’ contemporary Chrysippos, when 
demonstrating the dangers of treating universals as particulars, chose Megara and Athens as 
the prime binary pair: “If someone is in Megara”, he quipped, “he is not in Athens.”32  

It is not until the second half of the fourth century that Megarians begin to write prose 
works exploring the Megarian community and its past, for the first time preserving 
Megarian traditions in a Megarian framework. We know of five writers of Megarian local 
history (Megarika) before Strabo and Pausanias:33 Praxion (FGrH 484),34 whose history was 

                                              

29 = Steph. Byz. s.v. Nisaia: ἀπὸ Νίσου τοῦ Πανδίονος. ῾Ελλάνικος ἐν ῾Ιερειῶν α ̅· καὶ ἐν τῇ β ̅ καὶ ‘Νίσαιάν τ᾽ εἷλε καὶ 
Νῖσον τὸν Πανδίονος καὶ Μεγαρέα τὸν ᾽Ογχήστιον (cf. Apollod. Bibl. 3.210 and Paus. 1.39.5). 
30 See respectively Diog.Laert. 3.6, 2.106; Plut. de Ex. 14 605c-d (= FGrH 324 T14); and Lyk. 1.21.  
31 τί δὲ καὶ διαφέρειν ἂν δόξαι ἐπὶ ξένης ταφῆναι ἢ ἐν τῇ ἰδίᾳ; οὐκ ἀηδῶς γάρ τις τῶν Ἀττικῶν φυγάδων 
λοιδορουμένου τινὸς αὐτῷ καὶ λέγοντος ἀλλ’ οὐδὲ ταφήσῃ ἐν τῇ ἰδίᾳ, ἀλλ’ ὥσπερ οἱ ἀσεβεῖς Ἀθηναίων ἐν τῇ 

Μεγαρικῇ ὥσπερ μὲν οὖν <φησίν> οἱ εὐσεβεῖς Μεγαρέων ἐν τῇ Μεγαρικῇ. τί γὰρ τὸ διάφορον; ἢ οὐ πανταχόθεν, φησὶν 
ὁ Ἀρίστιππος, ἴση καὶ ὁμοία ἡ εἰς ᾅδου ὁδός; For Teles, see O’Neil 1977. 
32 See F278-279 (SVF von Arnim) = Simplic. in Aristot. Categ. F.26E and Diog.Laert. 7.186: Εἴ τις ἔστιν ἐν Μεγάροις, 
οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν Ἀθήναις· ἄνθρωπος δέ ἐστιν ἐν Μεγάροις· οὐκ ἄρα ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος ἐν Ἀθήναις. 
33 The title Megarika is explicitly given to the works of Praxion (FGrH 484 F1), Dieuchidas (FGrH F2a, 3-6), and 
Heragoras (FGrH F3 = BNJ 486A F1A and B). Plutarch, who is alone in citing Hereas, preserves no title for his work. A 
localized title like Megarika, of course, does not on its own prove that the cited text was a local history (see Marincola 
1999: 295). But our citations do indeed suggest that the title is used by scholiasts (FGrH 485 F2b and 3, 486 F3), by 
Plutarch (FGrH 485 F5), by Harpokration (FGrH 484 F1 and 485 F2a), by Clement (FGrH 485 F4, cf. F1), and by 
Diogenes Laertius (FGrH 485 F6) to refer to works of local history, viz. narratives, dealing to some degree with the past, 
that were limited in scope by the real or imagined territory of a single community. We know, moreover, of other 
‘Megarian’ texts that were not local histories, and these have their own system of nomenclature: Simylos’s Μεγαρική, 
which was probably a comedy (see Jacoby 1955: Noten 229-30 n. 7), and Theophrastus’s Μεγαρικός (Diog. Laert. 5.44; 
6.22), likely a philosophical treatise. For the shadowy Πραξιτέλης ὁ περιηγητής (Plut. Quaest. Conv. 5.3.7 675e), who 
wrote somewhere of Ino and Melikertes, see below (n. 80). Thorough surveys of the Megarika have been undertaken by 
Vogt (1902: 737-743), Jacoby (1955: Text 389-400 and Noten 229-237), Piccirilli (1975), and now Liddel, whose 
commentary and translation of the Megarian local historians is an exemplary addition to BNJ (2007). See also the 
interesting treatment of Okin 1985: 11-14 and Figueira 1985b: 133-134. 

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at least two books long (F2); Dieuchidas (FGrH 485), whose Megarika extended to at least 
five books (F6); Hereas (FGrH 486); Heragoras (BNJ 486A);35 and Aristotle, whose Politeia 
of the Megarians certainly drew on and so must to some extent have resembled the 
Megarika.36 The fragments from these works are slender and few – we have under thirty37 
–, and much of what remains, as we saw in the case of Plutarch, has been preserved in very 
Athenian contexts.38 Nevertheless, there is enough to provide a general impression of the 
Megarika, both in terms of authorship and content, and to suggest that in many ways the 
phenomenon of local historiography manifested itself similarly at Megara as at other Greek 
communities. 

                                                                                                                                                 

34 Donald Prakken argued (1941: 348 n. 2) that Praxion was a phantom and that the sole reference to his work on 
Megara (Harpokrat. s.v. Skiron = FGrH 484 F1) should be emended, the fragment reassigned to Dieuchidas 
(<Διευχίδας… ὁ> Πραξίων<ος>). But Prakken’s argument (seconded later by Davison 1959: 221) was adroitly dismissed 
by Jacoby (1955: Noten 230 n.2) and Dover (1966: 205 n.4). 
35 Jacoby, following von Willamowitz (1880: 8), treated Hereas and Heragoras together under FGrH 486, explaining 
the biformity of the name through hypocorism (1955: 394); Piccirilli wisely distinguished two separate historians (1974: 
287-422 and 1975: 51-56, 75), as has Liddel, who provides Heragoras with his own BNJ number: 486A. 
36 Aristotle’s work on Megara belongs to the corpus of 158 Politeiai that he himself wrote or whose composition he 
oversaw in the third quarter of the fourth century BCE (see in general Gigon 1987: 561-564 and Hose 2002: 15-105, 
127-261). For the question of authorship, see Rhodes 1981: 50–51, 58-63 and Keaney 1992: 5–17. The existence of a 
Politeia of the Megarians (which Okin and Figueira interestingly attribute to Chamaileon of Herakleia [Okin 1985: 19; 
Figueira 1985b: 137-139]), is proven by Strabo (7.7.2 = Gigon 1987: 561), who says that in his Politeiai of the 
Akarnanians, Aitolians, Opuntians, Leukadians, and Megarians Aristotle treated the Leleges’ conquest of Boiotia. There 
are references to Megara also in the Politics (3.1280b14, 4.1300a17, 5.1302b31, 5.1304b35, 5.1305a24), a text that 
probably preceded but nevertheless engaged with a similar set of traditions as the Politeiai (see Rhodes 1981: 58-59). Like 
the Politeia of the Athenians, Aristotle’s work on Megara probably drew on local sources, perhaps the Megarika that 
Dieuchidas was writing at just about this time (for a good discussion of the sources of the Ath.Pol., see Rhodes 1981: 15-
30; for Aristotle’s use of emic local historiography at Samos and Sparta in addition to Athens, see Tober forthcoming 
2018). 
37 Jacoby identified one fragment for Praxion (FGrH 484), eleven for Dieuchidas (FGrH 485), four for 
Hereas/Heragoras (FGrH 486), and thirteen anonymous fragments, which he collected under the heading of 
Sammelzitate. Piccirilli, on the other hand, followed Müller in assigning an additional fragment to Dieuchidas (viz. 
Parthen. Narr.Am. 13), separated Hereas from Heragoras, to whom he attached an additional reference (F1b = Eudok. 
Viol. 1021), and greatly expanded the corpus of anonymous fragments. Liddel, meanwhile, has chosen the middle 
ground, jettisoning Piccirilli’s category “Frammenti Adespoti di Provenienza Megarese”, and significantly reducing the 
fragments that Piccirilli included under the rubric “Frammenti Adespoti de Fonti Indicate Come οἱ Μεγαρεῖς” (he 
excludes Piccirilli F2b, 5, 6b, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 19, and 21a–b). 
38 Of the 16 discrete fragments from the Megarika of Praxion, Hereas/Heragoras, and Dieuchidas included by Jacoby in 
his collection, nearly half come from Athenocentric sources: three from Harpokration, one from a scholion to 
Aristophanes, and four from Plutarch’s Lives of Theseus and Solon. 

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For one thing, aside from Aristotle and Heragoras, about whom nothing is known, the 
writers of Megarika were themselves Megarian.39 Only Hereas, it is true, is explicitly called 
a Megarian, on two occasions by Plutarch (Thes. 20.1-2 and Sol. 10.5 = FGrH 486 F1 and 
4).40 Yet Plutarch speaks elsewhere, as we have seen, of ‘the historians from Megara’ (Thes. 
10 = FGrH 487 F1), so he was clearly aware of more than one native historian.41 Epigraphy 
provides further testimony. For a Megarian Dieuchidas appears with some frequency in 
the list of Delphic Naopoioi in the years leading up to the completion of the temple 
(338/7-330/29 BCE) – the name is rare enough to warrant the connection –, and he is 
there sometimes even identified as the ‘son of Praxion’.42 If we can indeed match up this 
pair of Megarians to our historians, Dieuchidas was evidently continuing or amending the 
history of his father, a phenomenon not in fact uncommon in the Greek world.43 

Like many other Greek local historians, moreover, these Megarians not only were 
members of the community about which they were writing but seem also to have enjoyed 
in that community positions of political or religious authority.44 Dieuchidas, once again, 
repeatedly represented his community at Delphi in the fraught decade following the Battle 

                                              

39 For the tendency of Greek local historians to write about their own communities, see Tober 2017. 
40 Ἡρέας ὁ Μεγαρεύς.  
41 The phrase that Plutarch uses, οἱ δὲ Μεγαρόθεν συγγραφεῖς, is unusual in its prioritization of the historians’ 
provenance (but cf. Plutarch’s similar references to Naxian historians: FGrH 501 F1-3). When the local historians of 
Athens are cited collectively, it is the texts’ contents that are usually at issue (see Jacoby 1949: 1-2), and the same can be 
said for historians from Argos (FGrH 311 T1 and F2), Euboia (FGrH 427 F1-2), Aiolia (FGrH 301 F1), Chios (FGrH 
395 F1), and Miletus (FGrH 496 F1).   
42 CID 2.32, 75-76, 79A, 97, 99 (= FD III.5.20, 49-50, 48+63, 58, 60A); Dieuchidas is listed as Praxion’s son on two 
occasions (CID 2.76 and 97). For the Naopoioi as an institution, see Bourguet 1896; Roux 1979: 95-135; and Sánchez 
2001: 124-152. For the equation between the historian and temple official – the name Dieuchidas, which is frequently 
muddled in the manuscripts (see Piccirilli 1975: 13), is in fact unattested elsewhere –, see Bourguet 1896: 233-234 n.1. 
Jacoby, who does not treat these inscriptions as Testimonia for Dieuchidas, nevertheless finds the correlation persuasive 
(1955: Noten, 231 n.5), as have others before him and since (see e.g. Schwartz 1903: 480-481, Prakken 1941: 349, and 
Piccirilli 1975: 14-15); but cf. Keil (1897: 413, n.1) and Davison (1959: 221), who argued that the historian lived a good 
deal after the Naopoios, from whom he borrowed the name in order to give his book “a certain cachet of antiquity”. 
Clement uses the ctetic adjective megarikos with reference to Dieuchidas (Strom. 6.26.8 = FGrH 485 T1), but this must 
mean first and foremost that he was treating Dieuchidas as an author of Megarika not that he considered him a Megarian. 
43 See the comments of Liddel in the “Biographical Essay” appended to his commentary on Praxion’s Megarika. Modern 
examples of the phenomenon abound; we can think, for example, of the Florentine Nuova Cronica begun by Giovanni 
Villani and extended first by his brother and then by his nephew. 
44 For an overview of the public life of Greek historians, see Meißner 1992: 215-315.  

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of Chaironeia, and, as Georges Roux has shown, the men chosen from the Amphictyonic 
poleis as Naopoioi were very frequently from families locally well-positioned.45 Hereas, for 
his part, may also have participated actively in the Megarian community. For at the 
beginning of the third century we find a Hereas, son of Aleios, as Theoros dedicating 
offerings to Apollo Prostasterios (IG 7.39),46 and this Hereas is perhaps himself the father of 
a Kallikrates who appears in a Megarian inscription dated to the middle of the third 
century (IG 7.141) and who is awarded proxeny at Delphi just after the Chremonidean 
War (FD III.1.189). Other inscriptions may perhaps also be brought into this discussion.47 
But the point in any case is that in Megara, as in a good many Greek communities, the 
decision to write local history was generally undertaken by locals who had a particular 
stake in claiming authority over their community’s collective past.48  

Megarian local historians, finally, adopted in their narratives a position toward their home 
community similar to that of other Greek local historians: even though they intended their 
work in part for local consumption, they nevertheless tended to imply a foreign audience, 
expounding details of Megarian behavior as if for the benefit of outsiders and generally 
engaging in what I have elsewhere called self-ethnography.49 Hereas detailed Megarian 
burial customs, for example, claiming, as Plutarch reports in his Life of Solon (10.1-6 = 
FGrH 486 F4), that at Megara the dead were buried facing west, with more than one body 
per tomb.50 This is normally, and quite reasonably, understood in the context in which 

                                              

45 107-8. In the years that Dieuchidas served, we find on the board trierarchs from Athens, the son of a priest at 
Epidauros, and an Aleuad from Larisa named Medeios, to name just a few examples. 
46 On Apollo Prostasterios at Megara, see Smith 2008: 117-118; on the theōroi, see Boesch 1908. The link between the 
priest and the historian is not firm, although Hereas’s discussion of Megarian and Athenian burial custom (FGrH 486 F4, 
for which see below) may indicate, as Prakken suggested (1944: 122-123), that he was writing after the reforms of 
Demetrios of Phaleron (317 BCE), a date that jibes with the activity of the homonymous Theoros. 
47 See Liddel, “Biographical Essay”, in “Hereas of Megara (486)”, in BNJ. 
48 Local historiography, to the extent that it allowed a Greek to forward a version of his community’s cultural memory 
that endorsed his own activities and view of the past, seems to have fulfilled in the poleis a similar role as autobiography 
and memoir would in the Roman Republic (see Tober 2017). 
49 For the frequent incongruity between a Greek local historian’s intended and implied audience and for the 
phenomenon of self-ethnography in general, see Tober 2017. 
50 Ἡρέας δ᾽ ὁ Μεγαρεὺς ἐνιστάμενος λέγει καὶ Μεγαρεῖς πρὸς ἑσπέραν τετραμμένα τὰ σώματα τῶν νεκρῶν τιθέναι – 

καὶ μεῖζον ἔτι τούτων, μίαν ἕκαστον Ἀθηναίων ἔχειν θήκην, Μεγαρέων δὲ καὶ τρεῖς καὶ τέτταρας ἐν μιᾷ κεῖσθαι. τῷ 

μέντοι Σόλωνι καὶ Πυθικούς τινας βοηθῆσαι λέγουσι χρησμούς, ἐν οἷς ὁ θεὸς ᾽Ιαονίαν τὴν Σαλαμῖνα προσηγόρευσε. 
ταύτην τὴν δίκην ἐδίκασαν Σπαρτιατῶν πέντε ἄνδρες· Κριτολαίδας, Ἀμομφάρετος, ῾Υψιχίδας, Ἀναξίλας, Κλεομένης.  

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Plutarch cites it, Salamis, with Hereas refuting a claim put in the mouth of Solon by an 
Atthidographer who had apparently exploited archaeological anthropology to prove 
Athenian tenure of the island.51 Yet whatever his aims, the Megarian Hereas clearly took 
pains in his history of Megara (geared, at least in part, for a local audience) to elucidate 
Megarian practice.52

 Dieuchidas also included descriptions of epichoric custom, 
expounding the Megarian practice of placing a tongue on an altar after a sacrifice, for 
example, a gesture that he linked to an early exploit of Alkathous (FGrH 485 F10),53 and 
elsewhere commenting on the so-called Aguieus, a type of column, evidently a common 
feature of the Megarian landscape, that he associated with the Dorians (FGrH 485 F2b).54 
This is the sole fragment from any Megarika, incidentally, that has been preserved 
verbatim, and although there are some problems with the text, we see that Dieuchidas 
expressly adopts the position of an outsider, twice employing with reference to his own 
community the phrase ἔτι καὶ νῦν, a tag that often signals an ethnographic register.55

 

Other evidence for the interest of Megarian local historians in Megarian custom comes 
from Plutarch’s collection of Greek Questions, if indeed behind it lurk, as Karl Giesen 
persuasively argued, Aristotle’s Politeiai, and if these texts did themselves draw on emic 
local historiography.56 Four of Plutarch’s Greek Questions deal exclusively with Megara (# 
16-18 and 59). One explains the peculiar Megarian use of the term ‘spear-friend’ by 

                                              

51 See Jacoby 1955: 395; Piccirilli 1975: 67-73; and Liddel ad loc. See also Prakken 1944, and Higbie 1997: 299-305. 
52 Plutarch does not purport to be quoting Hereas’s text verbatim, it is true, but his use of the present infinitive suggests 
that Hereas was not writing about defunct Megarian practice. 
53 = Schol. Apol. Rhod. Arg. 1.516-518c: Διευχίδας ἐν τοῖς Μεγαρικοῖς ἱστορεῖ, ὅτι Ἀλκάθους ὁ Πέλοπος διὰ τὸν 
Χρυσίππου φόνον φυγαδευθεὶς ἐκ τῶν †Μεγάρων ἤρχετο κατοικήσων εἰς ἑτέραν πόλιν. ὡς δὲ περιέπεσε λέοντι 

λυμαινομένῳ τὰ Μέγαρα, ἐφ᾽ ὃν καὶ ἕτεροι ἦσαν ἀπεσταλμένοι ὑπὸ τοῦ βασιλέως τῶν Μεγάρων, καταγωνίζεται 
τοῦτον καὶ τὴν γλῶτταν αὐτοῦ εἰς πήραν θέμενος ἤρχετο πάλιν εἰς τὰ Μέγαρα· καὶ ἀπαγγελλόντων τῶν 
ἀπεσταλμένων ἐπὶ τὴν θήραν ὅτι αὐτοί εἰσιν οἱ κατηγωνισμένοι, προσκομίσας τὴν πήραν ἤλεγξεν αὐτούς. διόπερ 

θύσας τοῖς θεοῖς ὁ βασιλεὺς τὸ τελευταῖον τὴν γλῶσσαν ἐπέθηκεν τοῖς βωμοῖς· καὶ ἀπὸ τότε ἔθος τοῦτο διέμεινε 
Μεγαρεῦσιν. 
54 = Schol. Aristoph. Vesp. 875(V): περὶ τοῦ Ἀγυιέως Ἀπόλλωνος Διευχίδας οὔτως γράφει· ἐν δὲ τῷ † ἰατρῷ τούτῳ 

διαμένει ἔτι καὶ νῦν ἐστι καὶ ὡς† ᾽Αγυιεὺς τῶν Δωριέων οἰκησάντων ἐν τῷ τόπῳ ἀνάθημα· καὶ οὗτος καταμηνύει ὅτι 
Δωριέων ἐστὶ τὰ τῶν῾Ελλήνων. †τούτοις γὰρ ἐπὶ τὰς στρατιὰς φάσματος οἱ Δωριεῖς ἀπομιμούμενοι τὰς ἀγυιὰς 
ἱστᾶσιν ἔτι καὶ νῦν τῷ ᾽Απόλλωνι. Harpokration also refers to Dieuchidas’s discussion of the Aguieus, although he does 
not claim to be citing the historian verbatim (FGrH 485 F2a). 
55 See Tober 2017. 
56 Giesen 1901: 461-465; see also Halliday 1928: 92-95. 

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postulating a period of stasis at Megara caused by tensions with Corinth; here, it is worth 
noting, the Corinthians who allegedly foment the Megarian civil war are described as 
“plotting to subjugate the Megarid,” not, as Demon would have it, already as successful 
conquerors let alone colonists of the region (Ait. 17 = Mor. 295 b-c). Two other Questions 
presuppose a period of ‘unbridled democracy’ following the tyranny of Theagenes; the 
first focuses on a law limiting interest on loans (παλιντοκία: Ait. 18 = Mor. 295 c-d), the 
second on the origins of a group of Megarians known as ‘Wagon-Rollers’ (Ait. 59 = Mor. 
304 e-f). While certainly revealing a concern for local custom, these last logoi also suggest 
that some Megarika may actually have pursued Megarian history into the historical 
period.57  

The remaining Question (Ait. 16 = Mor. 295 a-b) deals with an item of clothing worn by 
Megarian women: the so-called Aphabroma. When Nisos was king, Plutarch writes, he 
married a Boiotian woman, Abrote, daughter of Onchestos and sister of Megareus, a 
woman of great repute and so beloved by the Megarians that when she died they mourned 
for her on their own accord. Nisos, wishing to maintain his wife’s memory among his 
people, ordered the townswomen to adopt the sort of dress Abrote had once worn, and he 
named the garment after her. Apollo evidently approved of this custom; for whenever the 
Megarian women wanted to change their clothing, his oracle forbade it.58 The compulsory 
lamentation following the death of a Megarian potentate recalls the explanations of 
‘Megarians’ Tears’ with which we began. The expression of mourning for Abrote, to be 
sure, is sartorial not lachrymal; but like Zenobios and Diogenianos, Plutarch (relying 
perhaps ultimately on local sources)59 explains Megarian praxis through death and 

                                              

57 Although cf. Figueira 1985b: 119-121.  
58 τί τὸ καλούμενον ὑπὸ Μεγαρέων ἀφάβρωμα; Νῖσος, ἀφ᾽ οὗ προσηγορεύθη Νίσαια, βασιλεύων ἐκ Βοιωτίας ἔγημεν 
Ἀβρώτην, Ὀγχήστου θυγατέρα, Μεγαρέως δ᾽ ἀδελφήν, γυναῖκα καὶ τῷ φρονεῖν ὡς ἔοικε περιττὴν καὶ σώφρονα 

διαφερόντως. ἀποθανούσης δ᾽ αὐτῆς, οἵ τε Μεγαρεῖς ἐπένθησαν ἑκουσίως καὶ ὁ Νῖσος ἀιδίαν τινὰ μνήμην καὶ δόξαν 
αὐτῆς καταστῆναι βουλόμενος ἐκέλευε τὰς ἀστὰς φορεῖν ἣν ἐκείνη στολὴν ἐφόρει, καὶ τὴν στολὴν ἀφάβρωμα δι᾽ ἐκείνην 
ὠνόμασε. δοκεῖ δὲ τῇ δόξῃ τῆς γυναικὸς καὶ ὁ θεὸς βοηθῆσαι: πολλάκις γὰρ τὰς ἐσθῆτας ἀλλάξαι βουλομένας τὰς 

Μεγαρίδας χρησμῷ διεκώλυσε. 
59 In his commentary on “Question 16”, Halliday suspects that “the tone of the last sentence” of the passage suggests that 
it did not come from a Megarian source, “and this is borne out by the details” (1928: 92), viz. that in Plutarch’s account 
Nisos’ wife was Boiotian and that it was her (Boiotian) brother, Megareus, who gave his name to the polis. Okin agrees, 
arguing that Plutarch’s source here cannot be (directly or indirectly) “Megarian historical tradition” since Plutarch 
“totally ignores Megara’s version of its own early history” (1985: 14). But Pausanias’s tortuous foundation narrative that 

 

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mourning and, more to the point, interprets this mourning as initially local, spontaneous, 
and genuine.  

 

Localism in the Megarika 

The writers of Megarika typify Greek local historians not only in the role they played in 
their home community and the pose they struck in relation to this community but also in 
their broad conception of Megara’s historiographical compass and command over the past. 
For like their counterparts in other communities, they incorporated within the confines of 
a locally restricted narrative a range of nonlocal material.60 Where the Megarika most 
markedly diverge from other local histories, however, is in the particular means by which 
they effected this incorporation.  

Many local histories augmented the prestige of the focal locality by exploiting centrifugal 
force, by casting the local outward. The Atthides, for example, sent Theseus to Corinth, 
Crete, and the Black Sea;61 the Thessalika pushed Armenos beyond Pontos to found 
Armenia;62 and the Spartan Politeiai led Lykourgos to Iberia, Libya, and India.63 These 
enterprising locals, largely inhabiting the early period of a community’s past, were rarely 
made responsible for full-scale conquests of outside regions; their travels more frequently 

                                                                                                                                                 

Halliday and Okin seem to have in mind (1.39.5) does not directly contradict Plutarch – what ‘the Megarians’ object to 
in Pausanias’s account is the ‘Cretan War’ and the alleged capture of the city in the reign of Nisos –, and even if 
Pausanias did in fact intend to say that the Megarians of his day rejected all links with Boiotia, there is no reason to deny 
that all Megarians, or indeed a particular Megarian historian, may five hundred years earlier have nursed other ideas 
about the ktisis. Hellanikos derived Megareus from Boiotia (FGrH 4 F78; see above n. 28), and it was Hellanikos who 
allegedly gave Dieuchidas his starting point (FGrH 485 T1/F1 = Clem. Strom. 6.26.8): Μελησαγόρου γὰρ ἔκλεψεν .... καὶ 
Ἀνδροτίων καὶ Φιλόχορος Διευχίδας τε ὁ Μεγαρικός, τὴν ἀρχὴν τοῦ λόγου ἐκ τῆς ῾Ελλανίκου Δευκαλιωνείας 
μετέβαλεν (see Piccirilli 1975: 18). It is worth noting that Pausanias treats Deukalion in his section on Megara, saying 
that Megareus escaped the flood by following a crane to the heights of Mt. Geraneia and that Dieuchidas somewhere 
treated the mountain (FGrH 485 F8; cf.  Etym. Mag. 228 [Gaisford], s.v. Geraneia). For Boiotian claims on Megara see 
Hornblower (1996: 240-241) on Thuc. 4.72.1. 
60 See above (n. 33) for the implications of the title Megarika.  
61 For Theseus’s travels, see e.g. Hellanikos FGrH F323a F14-17; Kleidemos FGrH 323 F17; Demon FGrH 327 F5; and 
Philochorus FGrH 328 F17, 110-111. 
62 FGrH 129F1 and FGrH 130F1.  
63 FGrH 591 F2. 

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served as indicators of one community’s influence over another or at any rate its 
involvement in the wider world. While we know that in at least one Megarika (that of 
Hereas) at least one Megarian (Skiron’s son Halykos) makes it to Aphidna in Attica to face 
Theseus in battle (FGrH 486 F2), Megarian historians generally annexed outside material 
by applying the opposite, centripetal, force and drawing the outside world in.64 

In many local histories, this inward movement is best observed in the ideation of an 
original locality that exceeded, sometimes radically, the actual bounds of the civic 
community in the historians’ own day; the Atthides tended to include the Megarid in the 
kingdom of Pandion, the Argolika to posit an ur-Argos that comprised much of the 
northern Peloponnesos.65 Yet, while the Megarika do seem to have retrojected this sort of 
idealized territory, envisioning a primeval realm that included Salamis and probably 
Perachora as well,66 our evidence suggests that in Megarian memory centripetalism 
worked less to extend Megara’s size than to increase its mass. By exploiting Megara’s 
arterial status, Megarian historians found frequent occasion to intercept distinguished 
visitors as they traversed the isthmus and keep hold of them by burying them securely in 
Megarian soil. 

Hereas’s discussion of Megarian burial practices and the paremiology of ‘Megarians’ Tears’ 
with which we began have provided us the opportunity already to note how the Megarian 

                                              

64 There were other means, of course, by which Megarian historians addressed nonlocal material. One common strategy 
was simply to integrate (through digressions) into a narrative focalized by Megara episodes culled from the cultural 
memory of other communities: of Athens (BNJ 486a F1, FGrH 486 F1, and FGrH 485 F6), for example; of Sparta (FGrH 
484 F4-5); and of Rhodes (FGrH 485 F7; Dieuchidas’s logos of the Rhodian ktisis is in fact thick with detail about the 
exploits of the children of Triopas and about the hospitality of an otherwise unknown Rhodian named Thamneus). In 
each case, Megarian historians imposed a Megarian framework onto other communities’ pasts, applying the same 
heuristic tools with which they worked and reworked their own community’s history and using Megara as a lens 
through which to focus the history of the wider Greek world. 
65 For Athens, see FGrH 328 107; cf. Strab. 9.1.5; Paus. 39.4-6, and Plut. Thes. 25.3. For Argos, see FGrH 70 F115 and 
FGrH 334 F39; cf. Strab. 8.6.5. 
66 For Salamis, see Hereas FGrH 486 F4 (with F1 and 485 F6). Regarding Perachora, Plutarch tantalizingly claims in his 
Greek Questions that ‘long ago’ some Megarians were known as Heraeis and Piraeis (#17 = Mor. 295b): τὸ παλαιὸν ἡ 

Μεγαρὶς ᾠκεῖτο κατὰ κώμας, εἰς πέντε μέρη νενεμημένων τῶν πολιτῶν. ἐκαλοῦντο δὲ Ἡραεῖς καὶ Πιραεῖς καὶ Μεγαρεῖς 
καὶ Κυνοσουρεῖς καὶ Τριποδίσκιοι. That his discussion here ultimately depends on Aristotle’s Politeia is corroborated by 
Aristotle’s reference to Megarian komai in the Poetics (1448a29-39). On the Perachora, see Salmon 1972; on the 
synoecism of Megara in general, see Robu 2014: 15-33. 

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community constructed its past with recourse to corpses and their interment. The best 
place to observe Megarian preoccupation with graves, however, is Pausanias’s Megarian 
itinerary.  The whole Periegesis, it is true, brims with tombs. Yet Pausanias supposes for the 
Megarians a particularly rich relationship with the dead: at Megara, he proclaims, there are 
graves even within the walls of the polis (1.43.3)!67 This relationship is neatly encapsulated 
by the anecdote Pausanias preserves about the otherwise unknown Aisymnos (1.43.3).  
After the fall of the monarchy, he explains, Aisymnos, whose reputation at Megara was 
second to none, asked Apollo how his community might thrive in the absence of its kings. 
Told to take counsel with the many, Aisymnos and his countrymen naturally understood 
this as a reference not to the dēmos but to the dead, and they accordingly built their 
bouleutērion in such a way as to incorporate the tombs of their heroes.68 Far from 
symbolizing stagnation and moribundity,69 the dead here contribute actively to the 
negotiation of civic identity at Megara. For Hereas, too, in fact, graves implied something 
both about the past (Megara’s onetime possession of Salamis) and about the present 
(Megarians behave fundamentally differently from their Athenian neighbours). 

As in the case of Aisymnos’s bouleutērion, many of Megara’s graves were assigned to local 
heroes. Hereas wrote that Skiron’s son Halykos had his tomb at Megara, even though he 
had been killed at Attica (FGrH 486 F2). And Pausanias provides a litany of other dead 
Megarians, noting as he wandered through the isthmus the graves of Alkathous, his wife 
Pyrgo, and his daughter Iphinoë (1.43.4 = FGrH 487 F6);70 of Megareus (1.42.1 = FGrH 

                                              

67 For Pausanias’s appraisal of Megara’s graves, see Muller 1981: 218-22.  
68 εἰσὶ δὲ τάφοι Μεγαρεῦσιν ἐν τῇ πόλει: καὶ τὸν μὲν τοῖς ἀποθανοῦσιν ἐποίησαν κατὰ τὴν ἐπιστρατείαν τοῦ Μήδου, τὸ 

δὲ Αἰσύμνιον καλούμενον μνῆμα ἦν καὶ τοῦτο ἡρώων. Ὑπερίονος δὲ τοῦ Ἀγαμέμνονος – οὗτος γὰρ Μεγαρέων 
ἐβασίλευσεν ὕστατος – τούτου τοῦ ἀνδρὸς ἀποθανόντος ὑπὸ Σανδίονος διὰ πλεονεξίαν καὶ ὕβριν, βασιλεύεσθαι μὲν 
οὐκέτι ὑπὸ ἑνὸς ἐδόκει σφίσιν, εἶναι δὲ ἄρχοντας αἱρετοὺς καὶ ἀνὰ μέρος ἀκούειν ἀλλήλων. ἐνταῦθα Αἴσυμνος οὐδενὸς 
τὰ ἐς δόξαν Μεγαρέων δεύτερος παρὰ τὸν θεὸν ἦλθεν ἐς Δελφούς, ἐλθὼν δὲ ἠρώτα τρόπον τίνα εὐδαιμονήσουσι: καί οἱ 
καὶ ἄλλα ὁ θεὸς ἔχρησε καὶ Μεγαρέας εὖ πράξειν, ἢν μετὰ τῶν πλειόνων βουλεύσωνται. τοῦτο τὸ ἔπος ἐς τοὺς 
τεθνεῶτας ἔχειν νομίζοντες βουλευτήριον ἐνταῦθα ᾠκοδόμησαν, ἵνα σφίσιν ὁ τάφος τῶν ἡρώων ἐντὸς τοῦ 

βουλευτηρίου γένηται. For similarities between this oracle and that given to the Tarentines in Polybius (8.28.7), see 
Fontenrose 1978: 71. For the placement of the graves at Megara and its effects on the mythic space of the city, see 
Bohringer 1980: esp. 13-18 and, more generally, Pfister 1912: 445-465, esp. 459-462. For the office of aisymnetes at 
Megara, see Figueira 1985b: 140 and Herda 2016: 55-60. 
69 Pace Jacoby 1955: Noten 229 n. 6. 
70 cf. 1.39 (= FGrH 487 F3) for a different assessment of Iphinoë, see Dowden 1989: 78-80. 

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487 F5) and his son Timalkos (1.42.4 = Piccirilli 5.F8b = BNJ 487 F14b); of Tereus (1.41.8 
= FGrH 487 F8); and of the Olympic victor Orsippos (1.44.1 = FGrH 487 F11). In each of 
these cases, it is true, Pausanias derives his information from ‘the Megarians’, not explicitly 
from the ‘writers of Megarika’. Yet, even if he did on occasion rely on information 
imparted to him orally by local guides – it is only at Megara, in fact, that Pausanias 
mentions being led around directly by an expounder of local matters (1.41.2; see 42.4) –, 
so much of what he attributes loosely to ‘the Megarians’ jibes with the fragments, retained 
elsewhere, of the Megarika.71 If this indeed implies a familiarity (direct or indirect) with the 
texts of Praxion, Dieuchidas, Hereas, and Heragoras, we would be justified in treating 
Pausanias’s account as a potential storehouse of quotations from and references to 
Megarian local historiography. Indeed, we might even be able to identify fragments of the 
Megarika in places where Pausanias has not explicitly adduced ‘the Megarians’ as a source, 
concluding, for example, that Megarian historians had themselves included the story of 
Aisymnos and mentioned the graves of Kar (1.44.6), of additional sons of Alkathous 
(1.41.6 and 1.43.2) and of Megareus (1.43.2), and of the descendants of Melampous 
(1.43.5). If, however, Pausanias behaved aberrantly at Megara and relied there solely on 
oral sources, his testimony nevertheless suggests a remarkable perseverance and 
conservatism for Megarian tradition. This in and of itself should make his narrative, to 
whatever extent it adumbrates the contents of any specific Megarika, an accurate gauge for 
Megarian beliefs in the late Classical and Hellenistic periods and confirmation that the 
Megarians’ constitutive narrative was exceptionally attentive to the dead.  

What stands out about Megara’s graves, in the Megarika and in Pausanias’s account, is how 
many of them were alleged to be occupied by non-Megarians, in particular non-

                                              

71 On Pausanias’s use of local traditions and oral sources, see Lacroix 1994 and Pretzeler 2005: esp. 241-7. For the guides 
on whom Pausanias claims occasionally to rely, see Jones 2001. On Pausanias’s use of written sources, see Jacoby 1955: 
60-62 (remarks directed specifically at Pausanias’s Argolika but in fact more widely applicable); Habicht 1998: esp. 64-94 
on epigraphical sources; and Cameron 2004: 235-237. For Pausanias’s probable use of written sources in the case of 
Megara, including emic Megarika, see Piccirilli 1975: 81-82, who points out the significant overlap between what 
Pausanias attributes loosely to ‘the Megarians’ and the fragments from earlier Megarika, and Liddel, “Biographical Essay”, 
in “Anonymous, On Megara (De Megara) (487)” in BNJ. Pausanias’s complaint that “there has been an omission” among 
the Megarian exēgētai about a particular sanctuary to Athena Aiantis on Megara’s acropolis (1.42.4: τὰ δὲ ἐς αὐτὸ 

Μεγαρέων μὲν παρεῖται τοῖς ἐξηγηταῖς) suggests, for what it is worth, that he is not thinking of a local guide’s 
momentary lapse of memory but of a written corpus to which he has access. 

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Megarians originating from either side of the isthmus. Dieuchidas reports in the third 
book of his Megarika, for example, that Adrastus was buried in Megara and that the tomb 
to which Sikyonians laid claim was only a cenotaph (FGrH 485 F3).72 The scholiast to 
Pindar who preserves this fragment (Nem. 9.30a) says nothing of the circumstances behind 
Adrastos’s burial in Megara; but there is no reason to suspect that Dieuchidas had made 
Adrastos a Megarian, and he likely explained the hero’s death as would Pausanias: that he 
succumbed to old age and grief over the death of his son while leading his army back to 
Argos from Thebes (1.43.1).73 It was a similar journey, according to Pausanias, that 
brought the Argive Koroibos to Megara. He was compelled by the Pythia to walk south 
from Delphi and settle wherever the tripod that he was struggling to carry happened to fall 
– he made it all the way to Mt. Geraneia, Pausanias says, before he dropped his heavy load; 
and although it was there that Koroibos spent the rest of his days, founding a village that 
he named Tripodiskoi after the incident, it was in the agora of Megara that he was buried 
(1.43.7-8).74 Alkmene came to Megara along the reverse trajectory, happening to expire, 
‘the Megarians say,’ while walking from Argos to Thebes (1.41.1 = BNJ 487 F15).75 About 
her burial, Pausanias continues, the Herakleidai were immediately at loggerheads: some 
wanted to return the corpse to Argos, others to take it on to Thebes, where Amphitryon 

                                              

72 = Schol. Pind Nem. 9.30 περὶ τῆς ᾽Αδράστου εἰς Σικυῶνα μεταστάσεως ῾Ηρόδοτος μὲν οὕτω φησίν· ... ἄπαις δὲ ὁ 

Πόλυβος τελευτῶν διδοῖ Ἀδρήστῳ τὴν χώρην. Μέναιχμος δὲ ὁ Σικυώνιος οὕτω γράφει· … Ἄδραστος δὲ ... ἦλθεν εἰς 
Σικυῶνα, καὶ τὴν Πολύβου τοῦ μητροπάτορος βασιλείαν παραλαβὼν ἐβασίλευσε τῆς Σικυῶνος, καὶ τὸ τῆς ῞Ηρας τῆς 
᾽Αλέας καλουμένης ἱερὸν καθ᾽ ὅνπερ ᾤκει τόπον ἱδρύσατο.....Διευχίδας δὲ ἐν τῷ τρίτῳ τῶν Μεγαρικῶν τὸ μὲν κενήριον 

τοῦ ᾽Αδράστου ἐν Σικυῶνί φησιν, ἀποκεῖσθαι δὲ αὐτὸν ἐν Μεγάροις. See Hanell 1934: 97 and Jacoby 1955: 391 and 
Noten 232, n. 20. For Adrastos’s connection to Sikyon, see Hdt 5.67. 
73 Piccirilli considers this reference a fragment from the Megarika although Pausanias does not attribute the anecdote 
expressly to ‘the Megarians’ (1975: 5.15). See Pind. Pyth. 8.48 for an early reference to Adrastos’s return to Argos. 
74 = Piccirilli 1975: 5.19. While Pausanias does not explicitly assign this story to ‘the Megarians’, he does claim to have 
seen elegiac verses carved on the temple to Apollo that Koroibos allegedly built at Tripodiskoi, verses that told of the 
hero’s early exploits (the carved images above the verse, which showed Koroibos slaying Poine, were the oldest stone 
agalmata of which Pausanias knew). Pausanias assigns no provenance to Koroibos, but his assertion that the hero slew 
Poine “ἐς χάριν Ἀργείοις” does not in itself imply that Pausanias considered him to be a Megarian (pace Rigsby 1987: 
97). 
75 Jacoby did not include this passage in his category Sammelzitate, but Liddel is surely correct that the subject ‘the 
Megarians’ ought to be carried over from 1.40.5. 

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and Alkmene’s grandchildren had been laid to rest.76 Apollo intervened, suggesting that 
they split the difference and bury Alkmene in Megara. 

Other celebrated nonlocals in Pausanias’s account ended up at Megara for other reasons. 
Some had come on campaign, like Herakles’ son, Hyllos, who accompanied the 
Herakleidai on their invasion of the Peloponnesos and died at the hands of the Arkadian 
Echemos (1.41.2).77 Some had come to rule, such as the Athenian Pandion (1.39.4) or the 
Egyptian Lelex (1.44.3). Others had been on the run, fleeing oppression, like Eurystheus, 
who escaped from Athens after battling the Herakleidai, losing his life to Iolaus not in 
Marathon but at Megara (1.44.10). Some came already dead, like Adrastos’s son Aigialeus, 
who was struck down at Glisas in the first battle of the second Argive invasion, carried by 
his kinsmen to Pagai, and buried in what would henceforth be known as the Aigialeion 
(1.44.4). Others came to Megara expressly to die. So Iphigenia, whose father evidently 
brought her there before the expedition to Troy (1.43.1 = FGrH 487 F10).78 So too 
Hippolyta, who ‘the Megarians say’ withdrew to Megara after the defeat of the Amazons 
in Attica and once there sank into a fatal depression (FGrH 487 F10).  

Extreme grief is itself a common theme. It motivates the death not only of Hippolyta and 
Adrastos, but also of Autonoë, who had left Thebes and come to Megara, according to 
Pausanias, in mourning for her son Aktaion – she eventually died from her pains in the 
village of Ereneia (1.44.5).79  And grief also attends Ino’s death. It was at Megara, Pausanias 
writes, from the so-called Molourian Rock, that the Theban princess, fleeing her mad 
husband Athamas, flung herself and her swaddled son into the sea (1.44.7-8). Plutarch 
preserves a similar story in his Table Talk (675e = Piccirilli 5.4b = BNJ 487 F7a), attributing 
to an otherwise unknown periegete named Praxiteles the variant in which Ino rushed 
down toward the sea along the so-called Path of the Beauty.80 The lifeless Melikertes 

                                              

76 See Plut. Lys. 28 and De Socr. Gen. 5 for the tradition that Alkmene’s grave was also shown at Haliartos. 
77 = Piccirilli 1975: 6 F9; see also 1.44.10 = Piccirilli 5 F17. 
78 See also Philodem. De Pietate = P.Herc. 248 F3.13-6. Aulis’s claim was apparently not secure, for Pausanias here also 
mentions an Arkadian version of Iphigenia’s fate, and the Atthides seem to have placed her death in Attica (FGrH 325 
F14), perhaps, as Jacoby surmised, in answer to Megarian claims (Jacoby 1955: 186-188 and Jacoby 1931/1961: 345-455); 
see also d’Alessio 2012: 44-45 and Bremmer 2014: 176-177). 
79 For Ereneia, see Muller 1982: 379-405. 
80 See Piccirilli 1975: 100-101. 

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drifted or was carried by a dolphin to the coast of Corinth where he was honored as 
Palaimon.81 But Ino’s body could not escape Megara’s gravitational pull. Although she 
leaped far out to sea, Pausanias writes, the waves returned her to the Megarian coast, 
where she was found by the granddaughters of Lelex and buried not far from the 
prytaneion (1.42.7 = FGrH 487 F7).82  

This episode is the source of another lugubrious Megarian proverb: ‘The Sorrows of Ino’. 
Zenobios once again provides the fullest commentary (4.38): 

Ino, the daughter of Kadmos, had two sons with Athamas: Learchos and Melikertes, 
and a daughter, Eurykleia.  These were shot and killed by Athamas, when he went 
mad.  And with Melikertes, Ino threw herself into the sea by the Molourian rock, 
and, when she was swept by the waves to Megara, the Megarians pulled her out, 
attended to her corpse generously, and called her Leukothea.... On account of these 
things, then, there is the expression ‘The Sorrows (achē) of Ino’. For achos is grief 
that renders mute (achaneis) those who suffer hardships.83 

Unlike ‘Megarians’ Tears’, a phrase that views the Megarians as outsiders, ‘Ino’s sorrows’ 
may well have had a local origin; its paremiology, at any rate, belongs comfortably to the 
Megarian community, touching on features of Megarian topography and cult as it does 
and presenting the Megarians not as vassals but as reverential hosts. Yet, like the proverb 

                                              

81 See also Paus. 2.1.3. 
82 κατὰ δὲ τὴν ἐς τὸ πρυτανεῖον ὁδὸν Ἰνοῦς ἐστιν ἡρῷον, περὶ δὲ αὐτὸ θριγκὸς λίθων: πεφύκασι δὲ ἐπ᾽ αὐτῶ καὶ ἐλαῖαι. 
μόνοι δέ εἰσιν Ἑλλήνων Μεγαρεῖς οἱ λέγοντες τὸν νεκρὸν τῆς Ἰνοῦς ἐς τὰ παραθαλάσσιά σφισιν ἐκπεσεῖν τῆς χώρας, 

Κλησὼ δὲ καὶ Ταυρόπολιν εὑρεῖν τε καὶ θάψαι – θυγατέρας δὲ αὐτὰς εἶναι Κλήσωνος τοῦ Λέλεγος –, καὶ Λευκοθέαν τε 
ὀνομασθῆναι παρὰ σφίσι πρώτοις φασὶν αὐτὴν καὶ θυσίαν ἄγειν ἀνὰ πᾶν ἔτος. 
83 Ἰνοῦς ἄχη: Ἰνὼ ἡ Κάδμου συνελθοῦσα Ἀθάμαντι δύο ἐγέννησε παῖδας, Λέαρχον καὶ Μελικέρτην, καὶ θυγατέρα 

Εὐρύκλειαν. Οὗτοι ὑπὸ Ἀθάμαντος μανέντος κατετοξεύθησαν. Μετὰ δὲ Μελικέρτου ἡ Ἰνὼ ἔῤῥιψεν ἑαυτὴν εἰς τὴν πρὸς 
τῷ Μολουρίῳ θάλατταν. Καὶ τὴν μὲν εἰς Μέγαρα προσβρασθεῖσαν Μεγαρεῖς ἀνελόμενοι καὶ πολυτελῶς κηδεύσαντες 
ἐκάλεσαν Λευκοθέαν· τὸν δὲ εἰς Κόρινθον Κορίνθιοι θάψαντες Μελικέρτην ἄγουσιν ἐπ’ αὐτῷ ἀγῶνα τὰ Ἴσθμια. Διὰ δὴ 

ταῦτα εἴρηται Ἰνοῦς ἄχη. Ἄχος γὰρ ἡ λύπη, ἀχανεῖς ποιοῦσα τοὺς κακῶς παθόντας. Ταῦτα δὲ δηλώσει καὶ 
Μενεκράτης ὁ Τύριος. Menekrates the Tyrian, cited here, is otherwise unknown (FHG II 344 F6). This etiology comes, 
in fact, from a tenth-century revision of Zenobios: the so-called Zenobios Parisinus (Ps.-Zenobios), a text that often 
interpolates mythological exegesis from the Library (for Ps.-Zenobios, see Kenens 2014: esp. 160-163). ‘Ino’s Sorrows’, 
which appears as early as Ibykos (F282b Campbell), is similarly treated in Arsen. 9.61; [Plut.] de Prov. Alex. 6; and Suda I 
381.  

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with which we began, this one too shows the Megarians using lamentation as a means of 
appropriation, in this case of Ino and her anguish, behind which lie events much more at 
home in a history of Boiotia. Megara was not the only community that staked a claim on 
Ino – Pausanias mentions in his book on Messenia a place along the coastal road near 
Korone where Ino was said to have emerged from the sea as the divine Leukothea (4.34.4). 
But the Megarians managed to take permanent control of Ino through obsequies, latching 
on to her body before her apotheosis and binding it evermore to the Megarid.84 

Graves of nonlocals do of course appear in other communities’ local histories and cultural 
memory.85 Pausanias himself records a good many such graves outside of Megara: in 
Athens, the tombs of Antiope (1.2.1),  Deucalion (1.13.3), and Oedipus (1.28.8); in 
Corinth that of Medea’s children (2.3.6); the grave of Penelope allegedly lay at Mantineia 
(8.12.6); that of Anchises on the road to Orchomenos (8.12.8). But the burial of nonlocals 
is a phenomenon especially connected to Megara. Of the more than seventy graves that 
Pausanias notes in Attica, only fourteen belong to foreigners, and these include historical 
personages: the Plataians who died at Marathon (1.32.3), the Kleonaians who came to 
Athens’ assistance in 457 BCE (1.29.7), and Thessalians and Cretans who died fighting on 
behalf of the Athenians in 431 (1.29.6). Of the 27 graves that Pausanias places in the 
Megarid, on the other hand, a full half belong to nonlocals, and of the local occupants 
many come from the families of Alkathous and Megareus alone. Megara was well known 
for its tombs: in one striking epigram, Aratos even considered them as quintessential to 
Megara as columns were to Corinth (AP 12.129);86 and Sulpicius Rufus may not have had 
only Megarian decrepitude in mind when he wrote Cicero in 45 BCE that the city was an 

                                              

84 See Nagy 1985: 79-80. 
85 Lykeas wrote in his Argolika about Ariadne’s burial at Argos (FGrH 312 F4); the tomb of Idmon crops up in histories 
of Pontic Herakleia (FGrH 430 F2 and 432 F15); and the Tegean Ariaithos, who wrote in his Arkadika about the 
Peloponnesian sojourn of several Trojans (FGrH 316 F1), seems to have located the graves of at least Aineias and Kapys 
in Arkadia (cf. Dionys. Hal. 1.54.1-2). 
86 Ἀργεῖος Φιλοκλῆς Ἄργει καλός, αἵ τε Κορίνθου/ στῆλαι καὶ Μεγαρέων ταὐτὸ βοῶσι τάφοι·/ γέγραπται καὶ μέχρι 
λοετρῶν Ἀμφιαράου/ ὡς καλός. ἀλλ’ ὀλίγον· γράμμασι λειπόμεθα./ τῷδ’ οὐ γὰρ πέτραι ἐπιμάρτυρες, ἀλλὰ Ῥιηνὸς/ 

αὐτὸς ἰδών, ἑτέρου δ’ ἐστὶ περισσότερος. 

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“oppidi cadaver” (Ad Fam. 4.5.4).87 The impression that we get from Pausanias, however, 
as from Dieuchidas and Teles the Cynic, is of a Megara pregnant with foreign bones.  

When Megarians took it upon themselves in the late fourth and early third centuries to 
write about their community, they did so by recognizing that its past lay alongside, 
intersected with, reacted to, impinged upon other communities’ pasts. This ecumenical 
approach to local history was not unusual so far as Greek communities of the late Classical 
and Hellenistic periods were concerned. What does distinguish the localism articulated by 
the Megarika, by the traditions on which these texts drew and which continued to animate 
the Megarian community into the age of Pausanias, was the dislocation and removal to 
Megara of figures from the cultural memories of other communities. These dislocations 
did not, however, constitute plagiaries or “Räubereien”, as Martin Vogt once wrote, by 
which the Megarians sought “die Bedeutung des Heimatlandes künstlich 
herauszuputzen”.88 As our survey has suggested, rather than megarize these transplants by 
postulating local origins, Megarian memory generally maintained their foreignness, 
preferring to bury them as Thebans, as Argives, as Sikyonians. Megara’s self-avowed 
liminality was an influential trope, the foreignness of its graves axiomatic. This is evident 
in Pausanias’s account – so accustomed is he to assign Megarian graves to nonlocals that he 
readily interpreted even bona fide Megarians as foreigners89 – and elsewhere, too. 
According to Theokritos, in fact, Diokles, for whom the Megarians celebrated the 
Diokleia and whose tomb Megarian boys long venerated, was an Athenian exile (12.27-
34).90  

                                              

87 post me erat Aegina, ante me Megara, dextra Piraeus, sinistra Corinthus, quae oppida quodam tempore florentissima 
fuerunt, nunc prostrata et diruta ante oculos iacent . . . tot oppidum cadavera. 
88 Vogt 1920: 743. 
89 He makes into a Samian, for example, the celebrated Megarian flautist Telephanes (1.44.6: cf. Dem. 21.17; Athen. 8. 
351e; and PA 7.159), who is called a Megarian not only by Ps.-Plutarch (De Mus. 1137f- 1138a) but also in a fourth-
century choragic inscription from Salamis (IG II2 3093). For Telephanes’ grave, see Herda 2016: 79-81. 
90 The scholiast to Theokritos gives some background to the circumstances of Diokles’ death and the Diokleia held in 
his honor (12.27-33e), as do scholiasts to Pindar (Ol. 7.157; 13.156a and Pyth. 8.112 and 9.161). Aristophanes has his 
Megarian interlocutor swearing ‘By Diokles!’ in the Acharnians (774), which suggests an early recognition of local origins 
of the hero. Diokles was associated with Eleusis (see the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 153, 474, 477 and SEG 53.48 
A.fr.3.III.71), as Plutarch tells us (Thes. 10), which may explain the confusion in our sources about his origin. 

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Nor should these memorials be understood only as attempts to foster kinship with outside 
communities, let alone as vestiges of an authentic cultural heritage that Megara once 
shared with its neighbours.91 Such relationships may indeed have existed, and there were 
certainly occasions when the Megarians, or groups thereof, found it beneficial to retroject 
ties with Boiotia or with Dorian communities to the south, or when this sort of localism, 
which limned the Megarid as a facilitator of movement across the isthmus, would have 
seemed especially attractive: in the lead-up to the Peloponnesian War, to be sure, but also 
in the mid fourth century, when the Megarians were faced with new and shifting 
hegemonies to the south and north,92 as well as in the decades after Chaironeia, the age of 
Dieuchidas, when they found themselves negotiating yet another series of alliances. 

But in whichever direction the Megarian community at any one time faced, by preserving 
the alterity of its corpses, by dragging eminent Greeks from both sides of the isthmus, over 
land or from the sea, and anchoring them to Megarian earth through burial, through the 
monumentalization of tombs and the mechanism of remembered tears, the Megarians 
were able to construct a past that foregrounded their territory’s vital faculty to bridge the 
Peloponnese and the rest of peninsular Greece, articulating a local identity that was 
parochial and cosmopolitan at once.   

 

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