Geography

​Next he corrects Eratosthenes, saying some things well and others worse than he. For when Eratosthenes says that the distance from Ithaca to Corcyra is three hundred stades, Polybius says it is more than nine hundred; and when Eratosthenes gives nine hundred from Epidamnus to Thessalonica, Polybius says it is more than two thousand; these things are well said. But when Eratosthenes says seven thousand from Massalia to the Pillars, and six thousand from the Pyrenees, Polybius himself speaks worse, saying more than nine thousand from Massalia, and slightly less than eight thousand from the Pyrenees; for Eratosthenes has spoken closer to the truth. For people today agree that, if one subtracts the windings of the roads, the length of the whole of Iberia from the Pyrenees to the western side is not greater than six thousand stades. Yet Polybius puts the length of the river Tagus itself at eight thousand stades from its source to its mouth, surely not including the windings (for that is not geographical), but speaking in a straight line, and yet the sources of the Tagus are more than a thousand stades distant from the Pyrenees. On the other hand, he correctly declares this, that Eratosthenes is ignorant of Iberian matters, and that he sometimes declares contradictory things about Iberia; for example, after saying that as far as Gadeira it is inhabited on the outside by Galatians—if indeed those people hold the parts of Europe toward the west as far as Gadeira—he forgets this and makes no mention of the Galatians in his circumnavigation of Iberia.

​In setting forth that the length of Europe is less than that of Libya and Asia combined, he does not make the comparison correctly. For he says that the mouth at the Pillars is toward the equinoctial setting, while the Tanais flows from the summer rising; therefore, it falls short of the combined length by the distance between the summer rising and the equinoctial rising. For Asia preempts this part of the northern semicircle toward the equinoctial rising. For, apart from his stubbornness in matters easily demonstrated, it is also false that the Tanais flows from the summer rising; for all who are acquainted with these places say that it flows from the north into Lake Maeotis, so that the mouths of the river, the lake of Maeotis, and the river itself, as far as it is known, lie on the same meridian.

​But some who are not worthy of mention have said that it has its sources in the regions near the Ister, and from the west, not reflecting that in between, the Tyras, the Borysthenes, and the Hypanis, great rivers, flow into the Pontus, the first parallel to the Ister, and the others to the Tanais. And since neither the sources of the Tyras, nor those of the Borysthenes, nor those of the Hypanis have been explored, the regions further north than those would be much more unknown; so that the theory which brings the Tanais through those regions to Lake Maeotis, and then turns it back toward it (for its outlets are clearly shown to be in the northern parts of the lake, and indeed the easternmost of these), would be a fabricated and endless story. Equally endless is the statement of the one who said that it flows through the Caucasus toward the north and then turns back into Lake Maeotis; for this too has been said. Yet no one has said that its flow is from the east; for even if it did flow so, the more refined writers would not have declared that it flows in a direction opposite to the Nile and, in a way, diametrically, as though the flow of each river were on the same or some adjacent meridian.