I cannot at this moment give you an accurate account of the towns in the island of Taman, but they were without importance. The town of TANAIS, which may have been very ancient, was situated at the mouth of the river Tanais. This small kingdom, ever since the time of Mithridates, comprised the whole of the Crimea; across the isthmus, a line of fortifications had been constructed to defend the Crimea against the northern barbarians. An ancient Περίπλους περὶ Πόντον Εὔξεινον, the beginning of which is lost, is a compilation from the earlier Greek Περίπλοι and from the work of Scymnus of Chios, and contains the distances. But it is very doubtful when it was composed; I believe that it is a late production, perhaps of the time of Justinian, or even later, for all the distances are given in stadia and Roman miles, and the town of Chersonesus is called Cherson. Greek towns existed not only there, on the coast south of mount Kuban, about the promontory of mount Caucasus, but even in the easternmost corner of the Black Sea. On the eastern coast we find COLCHIS, which exported the products of those parts, which are extremely wealthy, and form one of the most fertile countries in the world. In the upper part it contains wide and beautiful valleys, but the land is too high and not as rich as in Mingrelia. DIOSCURIA, a port town on a gulf, PHASIS, and several other places on the south coast of the Euxine, were likewise founded by Greek colonists. If we proceed further west in this direction, we come first to TRAPEZUS, a place well known from Xenophon’s Anabasis, to which it owes its celebrity; afterwards it is not prominent again, until the time when a dynasty of the Comneni established itself there, which even survived the fall of the empire of Constantinople. In the earlier times it is not very important. It did not belong to Cappadocia, but was situated in the country now occupied by the Lazes, a people speaking a peculiar Caucasian language. At Trapezus, the Greek language has maintained itself among the Christians, while otherwise it is almost extinct in Asia Minor. The statement made in the oral traditions of the Greeks, that the Doric dialect was spoken there, is very doubtful. AMISOS, a Milesian colony[85] on the Euxine, the birth-place of Strabo, was an important Greek town in Cappadocia proper. It is strange that such a distant corner of the Greek world should have given birth to a Strabo; the number of faults that can be pointed out in his Greek diction is very small, and even these may be only dialectical; otherwise he writes excellently, for he thinks correctly; the loss of his history is ever to be lamented, for it was assuredly a first-rate work.