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City of Thessalia (area 2).
Larissa (also spelled Larisa) was the leading city of Thessalia in the Vth and IVth centuries B. C. Thucydides, in his Histories, II, 22, 3, mentions it first among the Thessalian cities that sent troops to help Athens against Sparta in 431, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, and gives the name of two generals from Larissa, one from each of the two leading factions.
Larissa was also the name of the citadel of Argos, and mythology knows of a Larissa, who was either the daughter or the mother of Pelasgus, the eponym of the Pelasgians and was from Argos. In the tradition that makes her the mother of Pelasgus, whom she had from Zeus or Poseidon, she was also the mother of Achæus (who, in other traditions is presented as son of Xouthus and brother of Ion) and Phthius, the eponym of the Thessalian province of Phthiotis, three sons who moved from Argolis to Thessalia and became the ancestors of the various peoples of Thessalia.
Larisa was the home of several leading Thessalian families, first among them, the Aleuadæ, offspring of Aleuas, whose leaders at the time of the Persian wars were three brothers, Thorax, Eurypylus and Thrasydæus, who sided with Xerxes (see Herodotus, VII, 6 ; VII, 130 ; VII, 172 ; IX, 1 ; IX, 58 ; Thorax was, in 498, that is, before these wars, the sponsor of the first extant ode of Pindar, then aged 20, the Xth Pythian, composed at his request (see antistrophe 4) to celebrate the victory of the Thessalian Hippocleas in the double-stadium race at the Pythian games). Another leader of the Aleuadæ toward the end of the Vth century B. C. was Aristippus, shown by Xenophon (Anabasis, I, 1, 10) as host of Cyrus the Younger, who helped him against rival Thessalian factions before Aristippus put at his disposal, in his attempt to overthrow his brother, a contingent headed by Meno, presented by Plato at Meno, 70b as Aristippus beloved.
Larissa was indeed the birthplace of Meno, who thus became, along with Xenophon and a few others, one of the generals leading several thousands Greeks from various places, in the ill-fated expedition of 404 (retold in Xenophon' s Anabasis) meant to help Cyrus the Younger, son of Darius II, king of Persia, overthrow his elder brother Artaxerxes II and take over the throne of Persia (Meno is featured in Plato's dialogue bearing his name, in which Socrates uses the example of "the way to Larissa" to help explain Meno that, from the mere standpoint of result in action, there is no difference between true opinion and knowledge : for a traveler asking a guide to lead him to Larissa, the result will be the same once he is in Larissa whether the guide knew the way to Larissa or guessed it based on true opinion (Meno, 97a-c) ; the example seems far fetched at first, but when one knows that finding the way to Larissa without knowing it is precisely what Meno should have done after the battle of Cunaxa, rather than (unsuccessfully) trying to save his skin by betraying and abandoning to a dire fate the Thessalian soldiers he had been put in charge of by Aristides of Larissa, and that Xenophon was able to do for all the Greek soldiers, including those from Larissa, as he tells us in the Anabasis, factually proving that it was possible to find the way back to Greece, and thus to Larissa for the Thessalian soldiers, based on mere opinion that turned out to be true in the end, then finding "the way to Larissa" based on mere opinion might well have been for Meno the grand opus of his life, what would have proven his excellence as a general, and, in this light, "the way to Larissa" can be understood as the way toward excellence, the way toward one's true and "eternal" home reached only at death, that each human being is supposed to seek in his life based only on opinion).