Geography

​What such prosperity, then, would you find around the Borysthenes and the maritime part of Celtica? Where the vine does not even grow, or does not bear fruit; but in the parts further south than these, both along the sea and around the Bosporus, it does bear fruit, though it is small-fruited and is buried during the winter. And the frosts among them are of such a kind at the mouth of Lake Maeotis, that in the place where in winter the general of Mithridates defeated the barbarians in a cavalry battle on the ice, he defeated the same barbarians in a naval battle in summer, when the ice had melted. Eratosthenes also adduces the inscription in the Asclepieium of the Panticapaeans on the bronze hydria that was broken because of the ice: “If any of men does not believe what things happen among us, let him look at this hydria and know; which the priest Stratios set up, not as a beautiful offering to the god, but as a proof of a great winter.” Since, then, the conditions in the aforementioned places cannot even be compared with those in the Bosporus, nor indeed with those in Amisus and Sinope (for one might say that those places are milder than even the latter), they could hardly be compared with the regions around the Borysthenes and the remotest Celts. For they would scarcely be under the same parallel as Amisus, Sinope, Byzantium, and Massalia, which are admitted to be three thousand seven hundred stadia further south than the Borysthenes and the Celts.

​And if Deïmachus and his followers, in addition to the thirty thousand stadia, assume the distance to Taprobane and the boundaries of the scorched zone—which must be set at not less than four thousand stadia—they will displace Bactra and Aria to places thirty-four thousand stadia distant from the scorched zone, which Hipparchus says is the distance from the equator to the Borysthenes. They will therefore fall into regions further north than the Borysthenes and Celtica by eight thousand eight hundred stadia, by which distance the equator is further south than the circle bounding the scorched zone and the temperate zone, which we say is drawn approximately through the Cinnamon-producing land. But we were showing that the parts above Celtica are habitable with difficulty as far as Ierne, which is not more than five thousand stadia. But this argument shows that there is some habitable circle still further north of Ierne by three thousand eight hundred stadia. And Bactra will be very much further north than the mouth of the Caspian Sea or Hyrcanian Sea, which is about six thousand stadia distant from the recess of the Caspian and the Armenian and Median mountains, and is thought to be the most northerly point of the coast itself as far as India, and to have a possible circumnavigation from India, as Patrocles, who led the expedition in these regions, says. Furthermore, Bactriana extends a thousand stadia towards the north; and the territory of the Scythians, which is much larger, occupies the land beyond this, and ends at the northern sea, though they live in a nomadic fashion. How then, if even Bactra itself already falls outside the inhabited world? This distance from the Caucasus to the northern sea through Bactra would be a little more than four thousand stadia. These, then, if added to the measurement of stadia from Ierne towards the north, make the entire distance through the uninhabitable region, on the measurement of stadia through Ierne, seven thousand eight hundred stadia; but if one should omit the four thousand stadia, the parts of Bactriana near the Caucasus themselves will be further north than Ierne by three thousand eight hundred stadia, and further north than Celtica and the Borysthenes by eight thousand eight hundred stadia.