River
Fl. Aous
Vijosë, Aoos
Listen to the story
The Aous runs across the map without a label of its own; modern editors supplied the name, and scholars have wondered whether its confusing variety of ancient names made the mapmaker leave it out. Today it is the Vijosë, flowing through Greece and Albania. Rising in the Pindus mountains, it crossed northern Epirus to the Adriatic. The Greek geographer Hecataeus called it Aias and said it sprang from the same spot as the Inachus, which flows the other way, towards Argos. Plutarch tells us that it was navigable from Apollonia down to its mouth, where an asphalt spring had a shrine of the nymphs and an oracle.