This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
Now the Peloponnesus is like a leaf of a plane tree in shape,1 its length and breadth being almost equal, that is, about fourteen hundred stadia. Its length is reckoned from the west to the east, that is, from Chelonatas2 through Olympia and Megalopolis to the Isthmus; and its width, from the south towards the north, that is, from Maleae3 through Arcadia to Aegium.4 The perimeter, not following the sinuosities of the gulfs, is four thousand stadia, according to Polybius, although Artemidorus adds four hundred more;5 but following the sinuosities of the gulfs, it is more than five thousand six hundred. The width of the Isthmus at the "Diolcus,"6 where the ships are hauled overland from one sea to the other, is forty stadia, as I have already said.
1 Cp. 2. 1. 30.
2 Cape Chelonatas, opposite the island Zacynthos; now Cape Tornese.
3 Cape Maleae.
4 The Aegion, or Aegium, of today, though until recent times more generally known by its later name Vostitza.
5 Polybius counted 8 1/3 stadia to the mile (7. Fr. 56).
6 Literally, "Haul-across"; the name of "the narrowest part of the Isthmus" (8. 6. 4.), and probably applied to the road itself.
Strabo. ed. H. L. Jones, The Geography of Strabo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
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.