Greek Texts & Translations

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 jelly-fish 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. ^note 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; ^note 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, ^note yet believes Pytheas, though Dicaearchus himself did not. ^note . . . Eratosthenes and Dicaearchus give mere popular guesses as to distances.