Methydrium

Methydrium, also called Methydrion, was a town in central ancient Arcadia, situated 170 stadia north of Megalopolis, and it took its name, like other places called Interamna, from lying on a height between two rivers, the Maloetas and the Mylaon. Greek mythology credited its founding to Orchomenus, but its inhabitants were relocated to Megalopolis when that city was established in 371 BCE, after which it never recovered its earlier population; the geographer Strabo counted it among the Arcadian places that had almost entirely disappeared, though it survived as a village into the time of Pausanias, who saw there a temple of Poseidon Hippius on the river Mylaon and, above the Maloetas, a mountain called Thaumasium said to hold the cave where Rhea took refuge while pregnant with Zeus. The town is also mentioned by Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Pliny the Elder and Stephanus of Byzantium.