previous next

Now in his advance Alexander encamped near the Caucasus, which some call Mt. Paropanisum.1 In sixteen days he marched across this range from side to side, and founded a city in the pass which leads down to Media,2 calling it Alexandria. In the midst of the Caucasus there is a "rock"3 ten furlongs in perimeter and four furlongs in height, in which the cave of Prometheus was pointed out by the natives, as well as the nesting place of the eagle in the story and the marks of the chains.4

1 Curtius 7.3.19-23; Arrian. 3.28.4. The Hindu Kush, which the ancients tended to confuse with the Caucasus (Arrian. 5.3.1-4; Strabo 11.5.5).

2 This is clearly a mistake, perhaps a scribal mistake, for India, and editors since Reiske have tended to correct the text accordingly. The city was known as Alexandria of the Caucasus.

3 Cp. the note on chap. 28.1.

4 Curtius 7.3.22. The story was rejected by Eratosthenes (Strabo 11.5.5; Arrian. 5.3.1-4).

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1989)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (1 total)
  • Cross-references in notes to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: