Scillus

Scillus, also called Skillous, was a town of Triphylia in ancient Elis, about 20 stadia south of Olympia. In 572 BCE the Scilluntians helped Pyrrhus, king of Pisa, wage war on the Eleans, but both Pisa and Scillus were razed after their defeat, and Scillus lay desolate until around 392 BCE, when the Lacedaemonians resettled it and gave it to the exiled Athenian Xenophon. Xenophon lived there for more than twenty years, reportedly writing the Anabasis, before being expelled by the Eleans after the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BCE; he had dedicated a temple to Artemis at Scillus in imitation of the temple at Ephesus and instituted a yearly festival there, and the temple and a marble statue of Xenophon still stood when Pausanias visited five centuries later.