Page:The geography of Strabo (1854) Volume 2.djvu/377

 B. TIII. c. i. 43. THE TROAD. 369 as abounding with springs on account of the multitude of rivers which issue from it, particularly where Dardania as far as Scepsis lies at its foot, and the places about Ilium. Demetrius, who was acquainted with these places, (for he was a native,) thus speaks of them : " There is a height of Ida called Cotylus; it is situated about 120 stadia above Scepsis, and from it flow the Scamander, the Granicus, and the JEsepus ; ] the two last, being the contributions of many smaller sources, fall into the Propontis, but the Scamander, which has but a single source, flows towards the west. All these sources are in the neighbourhood of each other, and are comprised within a circuit of 20 stadia. The termination of the ^Esepus is farthest distant from its commencement, namely, about 500 stadia." We may, however, ask why the poet says, " They came to the fair fountains, whence burst forth two streams of th' eddying Scamander, one flowing with water warm," 2 that is, hot ; he proceeds, however, " around issues vapour as though caused by fire the other gushes out in the summer, cold like hail, or frozen as snow," for no warm springs are now found in that spot, nor is the source of the Scamander there, but in the mountain, and there is one source instead of two. 3 It is probable that the 1 Modern maps place the Cotylus, and consequently the sources of the river which Demetrius calls Scamander, at more than 30,000 toises, or nearly eleven leagues, to the S. E. of the entrance of the Hellespont, when the source of the Scamander should be near Troy ; and Troy itself, according to the measurement adopted by Demetrius, ought not to be more than 3400 toises, or a league and a quarter, from the sea. There is therefore a manifest contradiction, and it appears, as I have already re- marked, that the river called Scamander by Demetrius, is not the river so called by Homer, but the Simo'is of the poet. Gossellin. Modern travellers accuse Demetrius with having confounded the Sca- mander with the Simo'is. The Simo'is they say rises in Cotylus, (Kas- dagh,) as also the Granicus, (Oustrola,) and the ^Esepus, (Satal-dere,) but the sources of the Scamander are below, and to the W. of Ida, near the village called by the Turks Bounar-bachi, which signifies the head of the source. If it is an error, Demetrius is not alone responsible for it, as Hellenicus (Schol. in Iliad xxi. 242) also says that the Scamander had its source in Mount Ida itself. Both probably rested on the author- ity of Homer, who places the source of the Scamander in Ida. They did not, however, observe that Homer employs the expression CLTT' 'tiaiwv opswv in a more extensive sense. Du Theil. 2 II. xxii. 147. 3 We owe to the researches of M. de Choiseul Gouffier, published VOL. II. 2 B