nning water which makes people who drink of it abstemious.
At this spring, there is an epigram in Greek verses inscribed on stone
to the effect that the water is unsuitable for bathing, and also
injurious to vines, because it was at this spring that Melampus cleansed
the daughters of Proetus of their madness by sacrificial rites, and
restored those maidens to their former sound state of mind. The
inscription runs as written below:

Swain, if by noontide thirst thou art opprest
When with thy flocks to Cleitor's bounds thou'st hied,
Take from this fount a draught, and grant a rest
To all thy goats the water nymphs beside.
But bathe not in't when full of drunken cheer,
Lest the mere vapour may bring thee to bane;
Shun my vine-hating spring--Melampus here
From madness once washed Proetus' daughters sane,
And all th' offscouring here did hide, when they
From Argos came to rugged Arcady.

22. In the island of Zea is a spring of which those who thoughtlessly
drink lose their understanding, and an epigram is cut there to the
effect that a draught from the spring is delightful, but that he who
drinks will become dull as a stone. These are the verses:

This stone sweet streams of cooling drink doth drip,
But stone his wits become who doth it sip.

23. At Susa, the capital of the Persian kingdom, there is a little
spring, those who drink of which lose their teeth. An epigram is written
there, the significance of which is to this effect, that the water is
excellent for bathing, but that taken as drink, it knocks out the teeth
by the roots. The verses of this epigram are, in Greek, as follows:

Stranger, you see the waters of a spring
In which 'tis safe for men their hands to lave;
But if the weedy basin entering
You drink of its unpalatable wave,
Your grinders tumble out that self-same day
From jaws that orphaned sockets will display.

24. There are also in some places springs which have the peculiarity of
giving fine singing voices to the natives, as at Tarsus in Magnesia and
in other countries of that kind. Then there is Zama, an African city,
which King Juba fortified by enclosing it with a double wall, and he
established his royal residence there. Twenty miles from it is the
walled town of Ismuc, the lands belonging to which are marked off by a
marvellous kind of boundary. For although Africa was the mother and
nurse of wild animals, p