ELIS, the chief city of the district of Elis, in the Peloponnesus, situated on the banks of the river Peneus, 120 stadia from the sea, and first formed into a district corporation by the union of several detached villages after the Persian war, about 490 years before Christ. The people of this portion of Greece had for ages been devoted to the pleasures of a country life, and they had been able to indulge this natural desire by the sacred character which had been long attached to their territory. At the time when Oxylus got possession of this fertile province, and became master of the temple of Olympia, he had such influence with the Heraclidae as to obtain from them the sanction of an oath that this district should be considered as under the immediate protection of the god whose festival was there solemnized. This seems to have been so strictly attended to that those who founded the city did not think it necessary to surround it with walls, or to take any steps to ward off the attack of an enemy. In the un-
settled times which followed the death of Alexander, Elis was occupied, and probably fortified, by Telephorus, who commanded the fleet of Antigonus. (Diodor. xix. 87; Strab. viii. 357; Xen. Hall. iii. 2, 20.) It appears, in the time of Pausanias, to have still retained much of its former beauty and magnificence, if we may be allowed to judge from the account he has left us of the public buildings. "Its ruins," says he, "are found now at a spot called Paleopoli, consisting of several masses of Roman tile and mortar, with many wrought blocks of stone and fragments of sculpture scattered over a space of two or three miles in circumference. The most remarkable of the ruins is that of a square building of about twenty feet on the outside, which is in the form of an octagon with niches. Like most of the other remains, it is built of alternate strata of Roman tile and stone rubble." (Leake's Morea, vol. i. p. 6.)