Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 1.djvu/474

 460 STRABO. CASAUB. 299. the Demus 1 in Ithaca, Pelethronium 2 in Pelium, and the Glaucopium at Athens. 3 With these and a few similar trifling observations, most of which he has drawn from Eratosthenes, whose inaccuracy we have before shown, he breaks off. How- ever, we frankly acknowledge, both with respect to him [Apollodorus] and Eratosthenes, that the moderns are better informed on geography than the ancients : but to strain the subject beyond measure, as they do, especially when they in- culpate Homer, seems to me as if it gave a fair occasion to any one to find fault, and to say by way of recrimination, that they reproach the poet for the very things of which they themselves are ignorant. As for the rest of their observa- tions, particular mention is made of some of them in the places where they occur, and of others in the General Intro- duction. 7. It has been our wish, while discoursing of the Thracians, and " the bold Close-fighting Mysian race, and where abide, On milk sustain'd, and blest with length of days, The Hippemolgi, justest of mankind," 4 Schol. in Homer, edit. Villois. pag. 382,) which was situated near Cyl- lene, a mountain of Arcadia, where he was born. See Apollodor. Bibli- oth. lib. iii. cap. x. 2. Hesiod, however, applies the same epithet to Prometheus, (Theogon. verse 613,) who, according to the scholiast, was thus designated from Acacesium, a mountain, not a cavern, of Arcadia, where he was greatly revered. 1 Homer, Iliad iii. verse 201, in speaking of Ulysses, says, "Of T$d$i iv d/7/*< 'l9a.KT)G. Some writers affirmed that the Ar}/ioc was the name of a place in Ithaca, while others think it a word, and understand the passage " who was bred in the country of Ithaca." On comparing this passage with others, Iliad xvi. vss. 437, 514, and with a parallel expression of Hesiod, Theogon. verse 971, one is greatly astonished at the ignorance and eccen- tricity of those who sought to make a place Demus out of this passage of Homer. 2 According to some, Pelethronium was a city of Thessaly ; according to others, it was a mountain there, or even a part of Mount Pelion. Homer. Eustathius, on the Odyssey, book ii. page 1451, remarks- that it was from the epithet yaw/ew7ric, blue-eyed or fierce-eyed, which he so often gives to Minerva, that the citadel at Athens was called the Glauco- pium, while Stephen of Byzantium, on 'AXaXicofisviov, asserts that both the epithet yXavicanrig and the name of the citadel Glaucopium comes from Glaucopus, the son of Alulcomeneus. 4 And the close-fighting Mysians, and the illustrious Hippemolgi, milk-
 * There is no mention of any Glaucopium throughout the writings of