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Dead men shouldered the sides of the galley, and the straits were stuck full of things like monstrous buoys, where tall ships had foundered. At Artemision he thought he saw signs of an anchored fleet with the low poops of the Hellenes, and sheered off to the northern shores. There, looking towards Oeta and the Malian Gulf, he found an anchorage at sunset.
And now, my son, hearken unto me. Thou knowest the hill of Oeta. Carry me thither thyself, taking also such of thy friends as thou wilt have with thee. And build there a great pile of oak and wild olive, and lay me thereon, and set fire thereto.
Wisdom, courage, true beauty, justice, full and firm knowledge of all things as they are; but wealth and glory and pleasure and all bodily things these a man strips off and abandons before he mounts up, like Heracles burning on Mount Oeta before deification; he too cast off whatever of the human he had from his mother, and soared up to the Gods with his divine part pure and unalloyed, sifted by the fire.
Unable to withstand this double attack, the Gauls were forced to retreat. This they did in the utmost confusion; large numbers perished, trodden to death by their companions still more were drowned in the morasses. Seven days after this severe check, a small party having attempted to cross Mount Oeta, they were attacked when involved in a narrow and difficult pass, and cut to pieces.
Never, perhaps, have the Greeks shown more military skill than in the choice of these stations. But one pass in those mountainous districts permitted the descent of the Persian army from Thessaly, bounded to the west by steep and inaccessible cliffs, extending as far as Mount Oeta; to the east by shoals and the neighbouring sea.
The nurse of the Dorian race the small province of Doris borders the Locrian territory to the south of Mount Oeta; while to the west of Locris spreads the mountainous Aetolia, ranging northward from Pindus to the Ambracian Bay. Aetolia gave to the heroic age the names of Meleager and Diomed, but subsequently fell into complete obscurity.
At the beginning of 608 the Achaeans advanced into Thessaly to reduce to obedience Heraclea near to Oeta, which, in accordance with the decree of the senate, had detached itself from the Achaean league. The consul Lucius Mummius, whom the senate had resolved to send to Greece, had not yet arrived; accordingly Metellus undertook to protect Heraclea with the Macedonian legions.
In Thessaly was situated the long and lofty mountain of the divine Olympus, and to the more southern extreme rose Pindus and Oeta. Its inhabitants were wild and hardy, and it produced the most celebrated breed of horses in Greece.
The flames spread apace and soon invested the whole mass. Milton thus alludes to the frenzy of Hercules: "As when Alcides, from Oechalia crowned With conquest, felt the envenomed robe, and tore, Through pain, up by the roots Thessalian pines And Lichas from the top of Oeta threw Into the Euboic Sea." The gods themselves felt troubled at seeing the champion of the earth so brought to his end.
The hills at the eastern extremity are called Oeta, and the highest of them Callidromus; in a valley, at the foot of which, reaching to the Malian bay, is a passage not broader than sixty paces. This is the only military road by which an army can be led, even if it should not be opposed.
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