Greece -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Rome -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
[Footnote 120: The two islands of Yviça or Ibiça and Formentera, which
belong to the Balearic group, were sometimes comprehended under the
name of the Pityussæ or the Pine Islands (Strabo, 167, ed. Casaub.).
The Greeks and Romans called Yviça, Ebusus. Iviça is hilly, and the
high tracts are well covered with pine and fir.]
[Footnote 121: This is the old name of the Straits of Gibraltar, which
is still retained in the modern form Cadiz. Gadeira, which the Romans
called Gades, was an old Phœnician town, on the island of Leon, where
Cadiz now stands. Strabo (p. 168, ed. Casaub.) says that Gades in his
time (the beginning of the reign of Tiberius) was not inferior in
population to any city except Rome, and was a place of great trade, as
it is now.]
[Footnote 122: This river, now the Guadalquivir, gave the name of
Bætica to one of the three provinces into which the Spanish Peninsula
was ultimately divided by the Romans for the purposes of
administration.]
[Footnote 123: This was the name for so much of the ocean that washes
the west coast of Europe and Africa as the Greeks and Romans were
acquainted with. The Greeks and Romans had no name for the
Mediterranean.]
[Footnote 124: The only islands in the Atlantic that correspond to
this description are Madeira and Porto Santo, but Porto Santo is forty
miles north-east of Madeira. The distance of Madeira from the coast of
Africa is about 400 miles or about 4000 stadia. The climate of Madeira
is very temperate: the thermometer seldom sinks below 60°, though it
sometimes rises as high as 90° of Fahrenheit. On the high and
mountainous parts there are heavy dews, and rain falls at all seasons.
Owing to the variety of surface and elevation the island produces both
tropical products and those of temperate countries. The fame of this
happy region had spread to all parts of the ancient world, though we
cannot safely conclude that the islands were known by report to Homer.
Horace in his 16th _Epode_ is probably alluding to these islands when
he is speaking of the Civil Wars and of flying from their horrors in
those beautiful lines:
Nos manet Oceanus circumvagus; arva beata
Petamus arva divites et insulas, &c.
]
[Footnote 125: The passage is in the fourth book of the 'Odyssey,' v.
563, and is quoted by Strabo (p. 31):
And there in sooth man's life is easiest;
Nor snow, nor raging storm, nor rain is there,
But ever gently breathing gales of zephyr
Oceanus sends up.
Strabo in another passage expresses an opinion that the Elysian fields
were in the southern parts of Spain. That would at least be a good
place for them.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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