Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 1.djvu/506

 492 STRABO. CASAUB. 320. enjoined the founders of Byzantium, in answer to their in- quiries, to build their city opposite to the Blind, applying this name to the Chalcedonians, who, although they were the first persons to arrive in these parts, had omitted to take possession of the opposite side, which afforded such great resources of wealth, and chose the barren coast. We have continued our description to Byzantium, because this celebrated city, 1 by its proximity to the mouth of the Euxine Sea, forms a better-known and more remarkable termination of an account of the coast from the Danube than any other. Above Byzantium is the nation of the Asti, in whose terri- tory is the city Calybe, which Philip the son of Amyntas made a settlement for criminals. CHAPTER VII. 1. THESE are the nations, bounded by the Danube and by the Illyrian and Thracian mountains, which are worthy of record. They occupy the whole coast of the Adriatic Sea, beginning from the recess of the gulf, and the left side, as it is called, of the Euxine Sea, from the river Danube to Byzantium. The southern parts of the above-mentioned mountainous tract, and the countries which follow, lying below it, remain to be described. Among these are Greece, and the contiguous barbarous country extending to the mountains. Hecataeus of Miletus says of the Peloponnesus, that, before the time of the Greeks, it was inhabited by barbarians. Per- haps even the whole of Greece was, anciently, a settlement of barbarians, if we judge from former accounts. For Pelops brought colonists from Phrygia into the Peloponnesus, which 1 The ancient Byzantium, there are grounds for believing, was marked by the present walls of the Seraglio. The enlarged city was founded by the emperor Constantine, A. D. 328, who gave it his name, and made it the rival of Rome itself. It was taken from the Greeks in 1204, by the Ve- netians under Dandolo ; retaken by the Greeks in 1261 under the em- peror Michael Palseologus, and conquered by the Turks in 1453. The crescent found on some of the ancient Byzantine coins was adopted as a symbol by the Turks.