Page:Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Volume 1 (2nd edition).djvu/134

112 remarkable that he says comparatively little of the country about the modern Sebastopol. From the canal of Constantinople, all the way to Dioscourias, he is copious and exact in giving the names and distances of all the towns, headlands, and rivers on the Asiatic coast; but in going round the northern shores, his intervals become greater, and his measurements less attended to; so much so, as to give great colour to the supposition that this part of his Periplus was not undertaken by himself in person, but that his information, addressed to the Emperor Hadrian, was gathered from such reports as he could obtain from those who asserted their. acquaintance with the coast. After leaving Pantacapæum, near the month of the Cimmerian Bosphorus, he gives us the names in succession of Cazeca and of Theodosia, an ancient Greek city of the Ionian race, a colony from Miletus, the fruitful parent of more than eighty cities of great celebrity in the ancient world, but even in Arrian's time, about one hundred and thirty years, that is, after our Saviour, ruined and deserted.

It is generally considered that the modern Caffa stands on or near the site of the ancient Theodosia, which was the boundary between the possessions of the kings of Bosphorus and those of Chersonesus, and a place of vast importance to ancient commerce, as well as to the Genoese, in their occupation of these shores, by whom it was called Krim-Stamboul, or the Constantinople of the Crimea. But Bishop Heber remarks, that after many days search, he could find no vestige on which he could rely as having belonged to the ancient Theodosia; and Dr. Clarke, with greater temerity, expresses himself convinced that it is not at Caffa, but at Stara Crim, the ancient Cimmerium, an inland town, from which the names Krim and Crimea are evidently derived, that we are to look for Theodosia. Be that as it may, the ancient name is still preserved upon the charts, by the appellation of Theodosia given to the Cape immediately to the southward of the town. Arrian then mentions the port of the Scytho-Tauri, which Bishop Heber supposes to be Sudak, where he visited Professor Pallas in his retirement from the malaria of Akmetchct; and Halmitis Taurica, which appears to be confounded with Lampas, whose name is still preserved in Lampat, and the port of Symbolum, which we have before said to be Balaclava, a name which Dr. Clarke derives from the Genoese Bella Clava, or fair haven, which would then be the translation of. But if he is right in calling the same place the of Strabo, it may more probably be the case that Balac, the first half of the word, is the same with the beginning of that Greek word, and that Balaclava means the harbour of. I am informed, indeed, by a Russian authority, that Balaclava has nothing to do with Genoese, but is an ancient Tartar name, and that other places, and those