Melas
Μέλας
Melas (Μέλας), the name of several rivers, so called from the dark colour of their water.
1.
A small river of Arcadia or Achaia, described by Dionysius as flowing from Mount Erymanthus. (Dionys. Per. 416; Callim. in Jov. 23.) Strabo (viii. p.386) confounds it with the Peirus or Pierus in Achaia; but the reading is probably corrupt. [ACHAIA p. 14a.]
2.
A river of Boeotia. [BOEOTIA, p. 413a.]
3.
A river of Malis, which in the time of Herodotus flowed into the Maliac gulf, at the distance of 5 stadia from Trachis. It is now called the Mavra-Néria, and falls into the Spercheius, after uniting its waters with the Gurgo (Dyras), which also used to flow in ancient times into the Maliac gulf. (Hdt. 7.198; Strab. ix. p.428; Liv. 36.22; Leake, Northern Greece, vol. ii. p. 26.)
4.
A river of Phthiotis in Thessaly, and a tributary of the Apidanus. (Lucan 6.374; Vib. Sequ. de Flum. s. v. Apidanos; Leake, Northern Greece, vol. iv. p. 515.)
5.
A river of Thrace, now called Saldatti or Scheher-Su, falling into a deep bay of the sane name (Μέλας κόλπος), which is bounded on the east by the shore of the Thracian Chersonesus. The modern name of the bay is the gulf of Saros. (Hdt. 6.41, 7.58, 198; Strab. vii. p.331; Liv. 33.40; Ptolem. 3.11. § § 1, 2; Mela, 2.2; Plin. Nat. 4.11. s. 18.)
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.