Pausanias went to the Aroanius river at dusk specifically to hear the fish sing. He waited until sunset, the hour when, according to local tradition, the spotted fish the Greeks called ποικιλίαι were most vocal. He saw them caught. He never heard a note. The traveler, who had documented temples and tombs and monuments across Greece with the patience of a man who believed in what he was looking for, left the riverbank disappointed — and wrote down the story anyway, because enough respected sources had mentioned these singing fish that he felt obliged to take the claim seriously. Athenaeus cited it. Pliny the Elder mentioned it. The fish were probably trout, famous for their spotted scales, and their singing was almost certainly the sound of water. But the fact that Cleitor was known across the ancient Mediterranean partly for its musical river fish tells you something about how strange and particular a place this was.
Cleitor occupied an enclosed upland plain in northern Arcadia, in the valley of the Aroanius river — known today as the Phoniatiko. The river rose in the Aroanian Mountains to the northeast, which formed the boundary with the territory of Pheneus, and flowed through Cleitorian territory from north to south before falling into the Ladon near that river's sources. The valley opened into two plains. The upper one held Lusi, once an independent town, later a dependency of Cleitor. The lower one held Cleitor itself: situated upon a hill of moderate height between two rivulets, the more important stream running south of the town also bearing the name Cleitor (today the Mostitsaiiko). The upper valley of the Ladon also fell within Cleitorian territory, completing a small but well-watered upland domain.
The territory was bounded by Pheneus to the east, Psophis to the west, Cynaetha and Achaea to the north, and Caphyae, Tripolis, and Thelpusa to the south. Pausanias traveled the main road from Caphyae to Psophis, which passed through the Cleitoria, and documented its waypoints: the oak forest called Soron, the ruins of Paus (mentioned also by Herodotus as a town of Azania), the settlement of Seirae at the border with Psophis. In Pausanias's time the forest still held bears and wild boars.
The mythological founder of Cleitor was a hero of the same name, son of the Arcadian king Azan — which placed the city at the heart of the ancient district of Azania, one of the oldest-named regions of Arcadia. The Cleitorians were celebrated among the Peloponnesians for what ancient sources describe as φιλελεύθερον καὶ γενναῖον: their love of liberty and their noble spirit. Even in mythological time, this was demonstrated: Plutarch records that when the Spartan king Sous was besieged by the Cleitorians in a dry place with no water, he negotiated his freedom by offering to return all his conquests if his men could drink. Every one of his soldiers drank. Sous himself refused, thereby preserving his claim to continue the war — a piece of dogged Spartan cunning remembered by Plutarch centuries later as a counterpoint to Cleitorian military pressure.
In historical times, the city fought alongside its Arcadian neighbors in the Theban War, warring against Orchomenus. In 220 BCE, during the Social War, it repelled an Aetolian assault on its walls — a significant defensive achievement for a small upland city. It was sometimes used as a meeting place for the Achaean League. Strabo incorrectly counted it among the cities destroyed in his era; in fact, Cleitor was still operating and minting coins as late as the reign of the emperor Septimius Severus, well into the Roman period. It also dedicated at Olympia a bronze statue of Zeus, 18 feet tall, in commemoration of its conquests — a monument to local pride preserved in Pausanias's record.
The territory of Cleitor contained a celebrated fountain. Those who drank from it, the Greeks believed, permanently lost their taste for wine. This was not a minor local legend. The fountain of Cleitor appears in ancient sources as one of the strange properties of Azania, alongside the singing fish — a pair of wonders that gave the district a flavor of the uncanny that serious writers thought worth recording.
Wine was not incidental to Greek civilization. It was central to religion, hospitality, the symposium, and the economy of countless city-states. A water source that removed the desire for it would have seemed, depending on your perspective, either a gift of extraordinary temperance or a curse of social exile. The Cleitorians may have regarded it as both, or neither, or simply as a local fact that distinguished their territory from everywhere else. The fountain's precise location within Cleitorian territory is not given by the sources; it was simply there, in the hills, and it worked, and the world knew about it.
Pausanias describes Cleitor's religious life efficiently. The three principal temples were those of Demeter, Asclepius, and Eileithyia. Four stadia outside the city stood a temple of the Dioscuri — Castor and Pollux — whom the Cleitorians called the great gods, an honorific that elsewhere in Greece was often reserved for the Cabiri or other mystery deities. Thirty stadia away on a mountain summit stood a temple of Athena Coria.
A small Doric temple was found just north of the junction of the Cleitor river with the Aroanius, and three Doric temples total have been identified, along with a theatre toward the western end of the hill. The city walls survive in nearly their full extent: they enclose an irregular oblong space not more than a mile in circumference, built about 15 feet thick and reinforced with towers. What the walls enclosed appears to have been primarily the acropolis, since the broader plain was found to be covered with stones, pottery, quadrangular blocks, and column remains — the residue of the lower town spreading out around the fortified height. The modern site sits near the present-day village of Kleitoria, the name preserving the ancient city's memory in direct descent.
Cleitor is located at approximately 37.893°N, 22.103°E in northern Arcadia, in the enclosed valley of the Aroanius river (modern Phoniatiko). From the air, look for the upland plain ringed by ridges — the Aroanian Mountains form the northeastern wall, with the valley floor visible between them and the lower terrain toward Psophis. Recommend viewing at 5,000–7,000 feet to appreciate the basin's enclosed character. The nearest major airport is LGRX (Araxos/Patras), approximately 55 km to the northwest. The site near Kleitoria village is most easily identified from the air by the river course running through the upland basin from north to south.