called the Teredo navalis, or Calamitas navium, which Madame Guthrie, who visited Sebastopol in 1795, tells us seemed here to have taken up its favourite abode[1]. It was up this harbour that Dr. Clarke proceeded in search of antiquities, and he makes the whole of the roads and harbour together to be the Ctenus of Strabo, which, from the northern side, meeting the harbour of Balaclava, the ancient Symbolorum Portus on the southern[2], made what was called the smaller or Heracleotic Chersonese, as part of the Greater Chersonesus Taurica or Crimea. It contained within it the cities of Chersonesua old and new, of which Dr. Clarke observed that some ruins still remained. They were much more considerable when the Russians first obtained possession of the Crimea; the gates even of the town being then in existence; but were speedily destroyed by the use of these ancient materials in the modern buildings. It confined, too, the celebrated Temple of Diana on one of two or three promontories in that part of the world, which were all called Parthenium, after that goddess; the remains of which name are still to be found in Parthenit, on the south-east side of the Crimea: all no doubt commemorative of the story of Iphigenia, and of the former barbarity of the inhabitants, before a greater degree of civilization and refinement was introduced by the Greeks, as denoted by the inhuman sacrifices attributed to the worship of the goddess. The Chersonese was called Heracleotic, as well as its town, from having been colonized and built by the people of Heraclea, on the southern shore of the Euxine. Under the Turks it obtained the name of Aktiar, it is said, from its white rocks; and the name of Sebastopol, though it sounds of ancient derivation, was not given to it till the reign of the Empress Catherine: a name, we should be disposed to say, singularly ill chosen, because it tends to root out the ancient appellation of the town and district of Chersonesus, and may cause some confusion in geography between this place and the real Sebastopolis of Arrian and others, which, like Cæsarea or Augusta, was evidently so called from σεβαστὸς, signifying Augustus, and therefore an ordinary appellation of the Roman emperor. This real Sebastopol was on the Asiatic coast, about two-thirds of a degree north of the river Phasis, and was still more anciently called Dioscourias, from Castor and Pollux the Dioscuri; the memory of which most ancient name is still preserved in the present appellation of Iskouriah. There was a time, indeed, when this ancient Sebastopol, or Dioscourias, was accounted to be part of Europe rather
- ↑ Guthrie's Taurida, p. 91.
- ↑ The appellation of Sinus Portuosus, found in Pomponius Mela, lib. ii. cap. i. § 3, would in sense appear to accord well with the harbour of Sebastopol, and has therefore sometimes ben identified with it; but the position he assigns to it between Cape Aia and the next point to the westward can only accord with Balaclava, which is truly καλὸς λιμὴν, et promontoriis duebus includitur.
