Gaul and Spain
From Ithaca to Corcyra is more than nine hundred
stades; from Epidamnus to Thessalonica more than two
thousand. From Marseilles to the Pillars is more than nine
thousand; from the Pyrenees, rather less than eight thousand.
. . . The Pagus from source to mouth is eight thousand,
not following its windings, but taking a direct line. . . .
Eratosthenes is quite ignorant of the geography of Iberia,
and sometimes makes statements about it entirely contradictory. He says, for instance, that its western coast as
far as Gades is inhabited by Gauls, since the whole western
side of Europe, as far south as Gades, is occupied by that
people: and then, quite forgetting he has said this, when
taking a survey of the whole of Spain, he nowhere mentions
the Gauls. . . . The length of Europe is less than that of
Libya and Asia put together by the distance between the sunrise in summer and at the point of the equinox; for the source of
the Tanais is at the former, and the Pillars are at the western
equinox, and between them lies Europe, while Asia occupies
the northern semicircle between the Tanais and equinoctial
sunrise. . . .
Southern Europe is divided into five peninsulas—Iberia;
Polybius's fivefold division of the European peninsulas, as opposed to the threefold division of Eratosthenes. |
Italy; a third ending in the Capes Malea and
Sunium, in which are included Greece and
Illyria, and a part of Thrace; a fourth called
the Thracian Chersonese, bounded by the
strait between Sestos and Abydos; and a fifth
along the Cimmerian Bosphorus and the entrance to the Maeotis. . . .
