Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 1.djvu/89

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CHAP. III. § 2.
INTRODUCTION.
75

himself sneers at for their absurdities. Why, he even points out as one of the follies of this Damastes, his observation that the Arabian Gulf was a lake;[1] likewise the statement that Diotimus, the son of Strombicus and chief of the Athenian legation, sailed through Cilicia up the Cydnus[2] into the river Choaspes,[p 1] which flows by Susa,[3] and so arrived at that capital after forty days’ journey. This particular he professes to state on the authority of Diotimus himself, and then expresses his wonder whether the Cydnus could actually cross the Euphrates and Tigris in order to disgorge itself into the Choaspes.[4]

2. However, this is not all we have to say against him. Of many places he tells us that nothing is known, when in fact they have every one been accurately described. Then he warns us to be very cautious in believing what we are told on such matters, and endeavours by long and tedious arguments to show the value of his advice; swallowing at the same time the most ridiculous absurdities himself concerning the Euxine and Adriatic. Thus he believed the Bay of Issus[p 2] to be the most easterly point of the Mediterranean, though Dioscurias,[p 3] which is nearly at the bottom of the Pontus Euxinus, is, according to his own calculations, farther east by a distance of 3000 stadia.[5] In describing the northern and farther parts of the Adriatic he cannot refrain from similar romancing, and gives credit to many strange narrations concerning what lies beyond the Pillars of Hercules, informing us of an Isle of Kerne there, and other places now nowhere to be found, which we shall speak of presently.

Having remarked that the ancients, whether out on piratical

  1. ↑ Thirty years before the time of this Damastes, Herodotus had demonstrated to the Greeks the real nature of the Arabian Gulf.
  2. ↑ This river, called by the Turks Kara-sui, rises somewhere in Mount Taurus, and before emptying itself into the sea, runs through Tarsus.
  3. ↑ The ancient capital of the kings of Persia, now Schuss.
  4. ↑ The very idea that Diotimus could sail from the Cydnus into the Euphrates is most absurd, since, besides the distance between the two rivers, they are separated by lofty mountain-ridges.
  5. ↑ Gosselin justly remarks that this is a mere disputing about terms, since, though it is true the Mediterranean and Euxine flow into each other, it is fully admissible to describe them as separate. The same authority proves that we ought to read 3600 and not 3000 stadia, which he supposes to be a transcriber’s error.
  1. ↑ The Ab-Zal of oriental writers.
  2. ↑ Now the Bay of Ajazzo.
  3. ↑ Iskuriah.
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