Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/302

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228
APPENDIX

the same city. Polybius therefore, joins both words together, and calls them Θερμῶν τῶν Ἱμεραίων; and so Ptolemee, Θερμαὶ Ἵμεραι πόλις, which Cluverius corrects Ἱμεραῖαι; and so an inscription in Gruter, "COL. AUG. HIMERAEORUM THERMIT." And if I may not say Himera was called Thermae, because they were not upon the same spot, I must not say neither, what everybody has said, that Naxos was called Taurominium; nor that Sybaris was called Thurii; no, nor that Smyrna was called Smyrna, nor Magnesia called Magnesia; for the new towns of those names were as remote from the old ones, as Thermae from Himera.

I had charged the letters with an inconsistency, because the fifty-first makes Phalaris's wife to have been poisoned at Astypalaea, soon after her husband's flight, but the sixty-ninth makes her alive in Crete many years after, when Phalaris was grown old in the monarchy at Agrigentum. Mr B. is pleased to reply, that here I make an unreasonable supposition, that the letters must have been written in the same order that they now stand; for if that do not take place, there's no manner of inconsistency between these two Epistles. Now what name ought to be given to such a writer as