In the days of his banishment, when Xenophon was now established by the Lacedaemonians as a colonist in Scillus[4], a place which lies on 7 the main road to Olympia, Megabyzus arrived on his way to Olympia as a spectator to attend the games, and restored to him the deposit.  Xenophon took the money and bought for the goddess a plot of ground at a point indicated to him by the oracle.  The plot, it so happened, had its own Selinus river flowing through it, just as at Ephesus the river Selinus flows past the temple of Artemis, and in both streams fish and mussels are to be found.  On the estate at Scillus there is hunting and shooting of all the beasts of the chase that are.

[4] Scillus, a town of Triphylia, a district of Elis.  In B.C. 572 the
    Eleians had razed Pisa and Scillus to the ground.  But between B.C.
    392 and 387 the Lacedaemonians, having previously (B.C. 400,
    “Hell.”  III. ii. 30) compelled the Eleians to renounce their
    supremacy over their dependent cities, colonised Scillus and
    eventually gave it to Xenophon, then an exile from Athens. 
    Xenophon resided here from fifteen to twenty years, but was, it is
    said, expelled from it by the Eleians soon after the battle of
    Leuctra, in B.C. 371.—­“Dict.  Geog. (s.v.)” The site of the place,
    and of Xenophon’s temple, is supposed to be in the neighbourhood
    of the modern village of Chrestena, or possibly nearer Mazi.  To
    reach Olympia, about 2 1/2 miles distant, one must cross the
    Alpheus.

Here with the sacred money he built an altar and a temple, and ever after, year by year, tithed the fruits of the land in their season and did sacrifice to the goddess, while all the citizens and neighbours, men and women, shared in the festival.  The goddess herself provided for the banqueters meat and loaves and wine and sweetmeats, with portions of the victims sacrificed from the sacred pasture, as also of those which were slain in the chase; for Xenophon’s own lads, with the lads of the other citizens, always made a hunting excursion against the festival day, in which any grown men who liked might join.  The game was captured partly from the sacred district itself, partly from Pholoe[5], pigs and gazelles and stags.  The place lies on the direct road from Lacedaemon to Olympia, about twenty furlongs from the temple of Zeus in Olympia, and within the sacred enclosure there is meadow-land and wood-covered hills, suited to the breeding of pigs and goats and cattle and horses, so that even the sumpter animals of the pilgrims passing to the feast fare sumptuously.  The shrine is girdled by a grove of cultivated trees, yielding dessert fruits in their season.  The temple itself is a facsimile on a small scale of the great temple at Ephesus, and the image of the goddess is like the golden statue at Ephesus, save only that it is made, not of gold, but of cypress wood.  Beside the temple stands