previous next
33.

This is enough of the story told by Etearchus the Ammonian; except he said that the Nasamonians returned, as the men of Cyrene told me, and that the people to whose country they came were all wizards; [2] as to the river that ran past the city, Etearchus guessed it to be the Nile; and reason proves as much. For the Nile flows from Libya, right through the middle of it; and as I guess, reasoning about things unknown from visible signs, it rises proportionally as far away as does the Ister.1 [3] For the Ister flows from the land of the Celts and the city of Pyrene through the very middle of Europe; now the Celts live beyond the Pillars of Heracles, being neighbors of the Cynesii, who are the westernmost of all the peoples inhabiting Europe. [4] The Ister, then, flows clean across Europe and ends its course in the Euxine sea, at Istria, which is inhabited by Milesian colonists.

1 ἐκ τῶν ἴσων μέτρων is an obscure expression. What Hdt. appears to mean is, that as the Nile (according to him) flows first from W. to E. and then turns northward, so the Danube flows first from W. to E. and then (as he says) from N. to S.; and so the rivers in a manner correspond: one crosses Africa, the other Europe.

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 Notes (W. W. How, J. Wells)
load focus Greek (1920)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

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

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Europe (4)
Nile (3)
Pontus (1)
Libya (Libya) (1)
Histria (Croatia) (1)
Danube (1)
Cyrene (Libya) (1)
Africa (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (22 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: