Page:The Natural History of Pliny.djvu/198

 164 plint's natural HISTOET. [Book III. and some at another, and so proceed in different directions ; and hence the result is, that no two accounts agree. (2.) At the present day the length of Bsetica, from the town of Castulo on its frontier, to Grades is 250 miles, and from Murci, which lies on the sea-coast, twenty-five miles more. The breadth, measured from the coast of Carteia, is 234 miles. Who is there that can entertain the belief that Agrippa, a man of such extraordinary diligence, and one who bestowed so much care on his subject, when he proposed to place before the eyes of the world a survey of that world, could be guilty of such a mistake as this, and that too when seconded by the late emperor the divine Augustus ? Por it was that emperor who completed the Portico^ which had been begun by his sister, and in which the survey was to be kept, in con- formity with the plan and descriptions of M. Agrippa. CHAP. 4. (3.) — OP NEARER SPAIN. Tlie ancient form of the Nearer Spain, like that of many other provinces, is somewhat changed, since the time when Pompey the Grreat, upon the trophies which he erected in the Pyrenees, testified that 877 towns, from the Alps to the borders of the Parther Spain, had been reduced to subjection by him. The whole province is now divided into seven juris- dictions, those of Carthage^, of Tarraco, of Caesar Augusta'*, of Granada. It was a place of great importance, and the chief town of the Oretani. Himiloe, the rich wife of Hannibal, was a native of this place. 2 This was the ' porticus Octavise,' which, havmg been commenced by his sister Octavia, the wife of MarceUus and Antony, was completed by Augustus. It lay between the Circus Flaminius and the Theatre of Mar- ceUus, occupying the site of the former portico, which had been built by Q. Csecihus Metehus, and enclosing the two temples of Juno and of Ju- piter Stator. It contained a pubhc hbrary, in which the Senate often met, and it was in this probably that the map or plan, mentioned by PUny, was deposited. It also contained a great nrmiber of statues, paintings, and other works of art, which, with the hbrary, were destroyed by fire in the reign of Titus. ' Nova Carthago or New Carthage, now Carthagena. original name was Salduba, but it was changed in honour of Augustus, who colonized it after the Cantabrian war, B.C. 25.
 * Now Cazlona, on the confines of New Castile and the kingdom of
 * Now Zaragoza or Saragossa, on the right bank of the river Ebro. Its