Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 1.djvu/98

 84 STRABO. BOOK I. carried out far into the sea. The force of the river current ceases at a very little distance beyond its mouth. Otherwise, supposing the rivers had an uninterrupted flow, by degrees the whole ocean would be filled in. from the beach on- wards, by the alluvial deposits. And this would be inevitable even were the Euxine deeper than the sea of Sardinia, than which a deeper sea has never been sounded, measuring, as it does, according to Posidonius, about 1000 fathoms. 1 10. Some, however, may be disinclined to admit this ex- planation, and would rather have proof from things more manifest to the senses, and which seem to meet us at every turn. Now deluges, earthquakes, eruptions of wind, and risings in the bed of the sea, these things cause the rising of the ocean, as sinking of the bottom causes it to become lower. It is not the case that small volcanic or other islands can be raised up from the sea, and not large ones, nor that all islands can, but not continents, since extensive sinkings of the land no less than small ones have been known ; witness the yawning of those chasms which have ingulfed whole districts no less than their cities, as is said to have happened to Bura, 2 Bizone, 3 and many other towns at the time of earthquakes : and there is no more reason why one should rather think Sicily to have been disjoined from the main-land of Italy than cast up from the bottom of the sea by the fires of JEtna, as the Lipari and Pithecussan 4 Isles have been. 11. However, so nice a fellow is Eratosthenes, that though 1 The word opywia, here rendered fathoms, strictly means the length of the outstretched arms. As a measure of length it equals four TTTJXHC, or six feet one inch. Gosselin seems to doubt with reason whether they ever sounded such a depth as this would give, and proposes to compute it by a smaller stadium in use at the time of Herodotus, which would have the effect of diminishing the depth by almost one half. 2 A city of Achaia near to the Gulf of Corinth. Pliny tells us it was submerged during an earthquake, about 371 years before the Christian era. According to Pausanias, it was a second time destroyed by the shock of an earthquake, but again rebuilt by the inhabitants who survived. 3 A city placed by some in Thrace, but by others in Pontus ; a more probable opinion seems to be that Bizone was in Lower Moesia, on the westei-n side of the Euxine. Pomponius Mela asserts that Bizone was entirely destroyed by an earthquake, but according to Strabo, (lib. vii.,) who places it about 40 stadia from the sea, it was only partially de- molished. 4 Ischia.