Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 1.djvu/171

 CHAP. iv. 2. INTRODUCTION. 157 such as Diccearchus, Eratosthenes, (who was the last of those who [in his time] had laboured on geography,) and Pytheas, by svhom many have been deceived. It is this last writer who states that he travelled all over Britain on foot, and that the island is above 40,000 stadia in circumference. It is like- wise he who describes Thule and other neighbouring places, where, according to him, neither earth, water, nor air exist, separately, but a sort of concretion of all these, resembling marine sponge, in which the earth, the sea, and all things were suspended, thus forming, as it were, a link to unite the whole together. It can neither be travelled over nor sailed through. As for the substance, he affirms that he has beheld it with his own eyes ; the rest, he reports on the authority o*f others. So much for the statements of Pytheas, who tells us, besides, that after he had returned thence, he traversed the whole coasts of Europe from Gades to the Don. 2. Polybius asks, " How is it possible that a private indi- vidual, and one too in narrow circumstances, could ever have performed such vast expeditions by sea and land ? And how could Eratosthenes, who hesitates whether he may rely on his statements in general, place such entire confidence in what that writer narrates concerning Britain, Gades, and Iberia?" says he, " it would have been better had Eratosthenes trusted to the Messenian 1 rather than to this writer. The former 1 Evemerus, or Euhemerus, a Sicilian author of the time of Alexander the Great and his immediate successors, and a native of Messina. He is said to have sailed down the Red Sea and round the southern coasts of Asia to a very great distance, until he came to an island called Pancheca. After his return from this voyage, he wrote a work entitled 'Ispa 'Ava~ ypaQr], which consisted of at least nine books. The title of this " Sacred History," as we may call it, was taken from the avaypcr^at, or the in- scriptions on columns and walls, which existed in great numbers in the temples of Greece ; and Euhemerus chose it, because he pretended to have derived his information from public documents of that kind, which he had discovered in his travels, especially in the island of Panchsea. The work contained accounts of the several gods, whom Euhemerus represented as having originally been men who had distinguished themselves either as warriors, kings, inventors, or benefactors of mankind, and who, after their death, were worshipped as gods by the grateful people. This book, which seems to have been w r ritten in a popular style, must have been very attractive ; for all the fables of mythology were dressed up in it as so many true narratives ; and many of the subsequent-historians adopted his mode of dealing with myths, or at least followed in his track, as we rind to be the case with Polybius and Dionysius. Vide Smith.