Book 34
6
In talking such nonsense he might well be regarded as having gone beyond even Antiphanes of Berga, and, in fact, to have left no folly for his successors to commit. . . .
7
From Ithaca to Corcyra is more than nine hundred stades; from Epidamnus to Thessalonica more than two thousand. From Marseilles to the Pillars is more than nine thousand; from the Pyrenees, rather less than eight thousand. . . . The Pagus from source to mouth is eight thousand, not following its windings, but taking a direct line. . . . Eratosthenes is quite ignorant of the geography of Iberia, and sometimes makes statements about it entirely contradictory. He says, for instance, that its western coast as far as Gades is inhabited by Gauls, since the whole western side of Europe, as far south as Gades, is occupied by that people: and then, quite forgetting he has said this, when taking a survey of the whole of Spain, he nowhere mentions the Gauls. . . . The length of Europe is less than that of Libya and Asia put together by the distance between the sunrise in summer and at the point of the equinox; for the source of the Tanais is at the former, and the Pillars are at the western equinox, and between them lies Europe, while Asia occupies the northern semicircle between the Tanais and equinoctial sunrise. . . .
7
Southern Europe is divided into five peninsulas—Iberia;Polybius’s fivefold division of the European peninsulas, as opposed to the threefold division of Eratosthenes. Italy; a third ending in the Capes Malea and Sunium, in which are included Greece and Illyria, and a part of Thrace; a fourth called the Thracian Chersonese, bounded by the strait between Sestos and Abydos; and a fifth along the Cimmerian Bosphorus and the entrance to the Maeotis. . . .
8
In the sea off Lusitania acorn-bearing oaks grow, upon which the tunnies feed and fatten themselves, which may, therefore, well be called sea-hogs, as they feed like hogs on acorns.
