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76
STRABO.
BOOK I.

excursions, or for the purposes of commerce, never ventured into the high seas, but crept along the coast, and instancing Jason, who leaving his vessels at Colchis penetrated into Armenia and Media on foot, he proceeds to tell us that formerly no one dared to navigate either the Euxine or the seas by Libya, Syria, and Cilicia. If by formerly he means periods so long past that we possess no record of them, it is of little consequence to us whether they navigated those seas or not, but if [he speaks] of times of which we know any thing, and if we are to place any trust in the accounts which have come down to us, every one will admit that the ancients appear to have made longer journeys both by sea and land than their successors; witness Bacchus, Hercules, nay Jason himself, and again Ulysses and Menelaus, of whom Homer tells us. It seems most probable that Theseus and Pirithous are indebted to some long voyages for the credit they afterwards obtained of having visited the infernal regions; and in like manner the Dioscuri[1] gained the appellation of guardians of the sea, and the deliverers of sailors.[2] The sovereignty of the seas excercised by Minos, and the navigation carried on by the Phœnicians, is well known. A little after the period of the Trojan war they had penetrated beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and founded cities as well there as to the midst of the African coast.[3] Is it not correct to number amongst the ancients Æneas,[4] Antenor,[5] the Heneti, and all the crowd of warriors, who, after the destruction of Troy, wandered over the face of the whole earth? For at the conclusion of the war

  1. ↑ Castor and Pollux.
  2. ↑ Castor and Pollux were amongst the number of the Argonauts. On their return they destroyed the pirates who infested the seas of Greece and the Archipelago, and were in consequence worshipped by sailors as tutelary deities.
  3. ↑ The Phœnicians or Carthaginians despatched Hanno to found certain colonies on the western coast of Africa, about a thousand years before the Christian era.
  4. ↑ Strabo here follows the general belief that Æneas escaped to Italy after the sack of Troy, a fact clearly disproved by Homer, Iliad xx. 307, who states that the posterity of Æneas were in his time reigning at Troy. To this passage Strabo alludes in his 13th book, and, contrary to his general custom, hesitates whether to follow Homer’s authority or that of certain grammarians who had mutilated the passage in order to flatter the vanity of the Romans, who took pride in looking up to Æneas and the Trojans as their ancestors.
  5. ↑ Antenor having betrayed his Trojan countrymen was forced to fly.
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