HKB
[Sidenote: Cadiz to the Don.]
+5.+ In treating of the geography of Europe I shall say nothing of the ancient geographers, but shall confine my attention to their modern critics, Dicaearchus, Eratosthenes, who is the most recent writer on geography, and Pytheas, who has misled many readers by professing to have traversed on foot the whole of Britain, the coastline of which island, he says, is more than forty thousand stades. And again by his stories of Thule and the countries in its neighbourhood, “in which,” he says, “there is neither unmixed land or sea or air, but a kind of compound of all three (like the jellyfish or Pulmo Marinus), in which earth and sea and everything else are held in suspense, and which forms a kind of connecting link to the whole, through which one can neither walk nor sail.” This substance, which he says is like the Pulmo Marinus, he saw with his own eyes, the rest he learnt by report. Such is Pytheas’s story, and he adds that, on his return thence, he traversed the whole of the coast of Europe from Gades to the Tanais. But we cannot believe that a private person, who was also a poor man, should have made such immense journeys by land and sea. Even Eratosthenes doubted this part of his story, though he believed what he said about Britain, and Gades, and Iberia. I would much rather believe the Messenian (Euhemerus) than him. The latter is content with saying that he sailed to one country which he calls Panchaia;[219] while the former asserts that he has actually seen the whole northern coast of Europe up to the very verge of the world, which one would hardly believe of Hermes himself if he said it. Eratosthenes calls Euhemerus a Bergaean,[220] yet believes Pytheas, though Dicaearchus himself did not.[221]... Eratosthenes and Dicaearchus give mere popular guesses as to distances.
+6.+ For instance, Dicaearchus says that the distance from the Peloponnese to the Pillars is ten thousand stades and still further to the head of the Adriatic; and from the Peloponnesus to the Sicilian straits three thousand; and therefore the remainder, from the Straits to the Pillars, is seven thousand stades. I say nothing about the three thousand stades, whether they are right or wrong; but the seven thousand cannot be made out, whether you measure along the coast or straight across the sea. The coast route is a kind of obtuse angle, contained by two lines resting on the straits and the pillars respectively; so that we have a triangle, of which the apex is Narbo, and the base the straight line representing the course by the open sea; of the two sides of the triangle which contain the obtuse angle, that which extends from the straits to Narbo is more than eleven thousand two hundred stades, the other from Narbo to the Pillars is a little under eight thousand. The longest distance from Europe to Libya across the Tuscan sea is allowed to be not more than three thousand stades, that by the Sardinian sea is somewhat less; but let us call it three thousand stades. Now suppose a perpendicular let down through the gulf of Narbo to the base of the triangle, that is to the straight sea-course, measuring two thousand stades; it requires only a schoolboy’s geometry to prove that the coasting voyage is longer than the direct sea voyage by nearly five hundred stades.[222] And when the three thousand stades from the Peloponnese to the straits are added, the whole number of the stades even of the straight sea course will be more than double Dicaearchus’s reckoning. And if we measure to the head of the Adriatic we must add still more by his own admission; that is to say, from the Peloponnese to Leucas is seven hundred stades, from Leucas to Corcyra seven hundred, from Corcyra to Ceraunia seven hundred, and from Ceraunia along the Illyrian coast six thousand one hundred and fifty.[223]