led on the other side of the
river were neither willing to follow Pitzas nor to be subjects of the
emperor. And Belisarius gave him a small number of soldiers to help him
guard that territory. And before this the Calabrians and Apulians, since
no Goths were present in their land, had willingly submitted themselves
to Belisarius, both those on the coast and those who held the interior.

Among the interior towns is Beneventus,[72] which in ancient times the
Romans had named "Maleventus," but now they call it Beneventus, avoiding
the evil omen of the former name,[73] "ventus" having the meaning "wind"
in the Latin tongue. For in Dalmatia, which lies across from this city
on the opposite mainland, a wind of great violence and exceedingly wild
is wont to fall upon the country, and when this begins to blow, it is
impossible to find a man there who continues to travel on the road, but
all shut themselves up at home and wait. Such, indeed, is the force of
the wind that it seizes a man on horseback together with his horse and
carries him through the air, and then, after whirling him about in the
air to a great distance, it throws him down wherever he may chance to be
and kills him. And it so happens that Beneventus, being opposite to
Dalmatia, as I have said, and situated on rather high ground, gets some
of the disadvantage of this same wind. This city was built of old by
Diomedes, the son of Tydeus, when after the capture of Troy he was
repulsed from Argos. And he left to the city as a token the tusks of the
Calydonian boar, which his uncle Meleager had received as a prize of the
hunt, and they are there even up to my time, a noteworthy sight and well
worth seeing, measuring not less than three spans around and having the
form of a crescent. There, too, they say that Diomedes met Aeneas, the
son of Anchises, when he was coming from Ilium, and in obedience to the
oracle gave him the statue of Athena which he had seized as plunder in
company with Odysseus, when the two went into Troy as spies before the
city was captured by the Greeks. For they tell the story that when he
fell sick at a later time, and made enquiry concerning the disease, the
oracle responded that he would never be freed from his malady unless he
should give this statue to a man of Troy. And as to where in the world
the statue itself is, the Romans say they do not know, but even up to my
time they shew a copy of it chiselled on a certain stone in the temple
of For