than of Asia: for although the Tansis has been long, by common consent, deemed to be the boundary of these two quarters of the globe, we learn from Arrian, as we indeed had before heard from Herodotus[1], who clearly adopts the opinion, that the Phasis was once considered in that light; and this ancient point of geography has been the means of preserving to us a fragment of a lost play of Æschylus[2], the Prometheus Released (the sequel of the drama that has come down to us, the Prometheus Bound), which Arrian quotes in order to prove his assertion. The Titans are made to say to Prometheus, 'We are come,
τοὺς σοὺς ἄθλους τόυσδε, Προμηθεῦ,
δεσμοῦ τε πάθος τοδ῾ ἐποψόμενοι,
and then, in relating what countries they have traversed in their course, they specify
τῆς μὲν διδύμου χθονὸς, Εὐρώπης
μεγάλης τ᾽ Ἀσίας τέρμονα Φᾶσιν[3].
This true Sebastopol, or Dioscourias, was also a place of the greatest consequence to the commerce of the ancient world, inasmuch as it was the great port from which tile produce of the countries in the neighbourhood of Caucasus, and of India itself, was shipped for Europe: and so great was the concourse of merchants there assembled, and so various their tongues, that we are told by Pliny[4] the Romans maintained in that city no less than one hundred and thirty interpreters, to facilitate the progress of their traffic with the People of three hundred nations. We cannot, perhaps, better illustrate the facility of mistake between the two Sebastopols, than by saying that Captain Jones has inadvertently applied this statement to the Sebastopol of the Crimea[5].
But although Arrian gives us much information upon the locality of places on the south and eastern side of the Euxine, it is
- ↑ Melpomene, c. 45.
- ↑ As Æschylus and Herodotus were so near each other in point of time, we may infer that this opinion was the common one of their day. It is rather a curious point of chronology, with respect to some of the principal authors who have come down to us, that at the battle of Salamis, B.C. 480, Æschylus was forty-five years o1d, fought in it as he did at Marathon, and describes it in his Persæ; Pindar was thirty-eight; Sophocles was twenty-five; Herodotus was four; and Euripides was born on the very day.
- ↑ I have adopted this emendation of the words of Arrian, which cannot be reconciled with the metre,
τῇ μὲν δίδυμον χθονὸς Εὐρώπης
μέγαν τῇδ᾽ Ασίας τέρμονα Φᾶσιν,from Bp. Blomfield's preface to the Persæ of Esehylus, p. xv., where he points out another geographical fragment of the same play in Strabo.
- ↑ Urbe Colchorum Dioscuriade, juxta fluvium Anthemunta, nunc deserts: quondam adeo clara, ut Timosthones in eam ccc nationes, quæ dissimilibus linguis uterentur, descendere prodiderit: et postes a nestris cxxx interpretibus negotia ibi gesta–Plin. lib. vi. cap. 5.
- ↑ Vol. ii. p. 252.
