“Stormy weather (he adds) might undoubtedly occasion delays in such a country, as well as it is known to do at sea: for when violent winds prevail in level and barren tracts, the sand which is raised by them is driven so forcibly into the faces and eyes of those who cross them, that their progress is considerably impeded. So soon as the people of Cyrene were aware of the ground which they had lost, and reflected on the punishment which would await them, in consequence, on their return, they began to accuse the Carthaginians of having set out before the appointed time; and when a dispute arose on the subject, they determined to brave everything rather than return home defeated. In this state of affairs, the Carthaginians desired the Greeks to name some conditions of accommodation; and when the latter proposed that the deputies from Carthage should either be buried on the spot which they claimed as the boundary, or allow them to advance as far as they chose on the same conditions, the Philæni immediately accepted the terms, and giving themselves up to the service of their country, were buried alive on the spot where the dispute had occurred. On the same spot two altars were consecrated to their memory by the people of Carthage, and other honours were also decreed to them at home[10].” In the old map of Peutinger (as we have stated above) we find the Philænean altars placed much farther to the westward in the neighbourhood of the little Syrtis; but the authorities of Ptolemy[11], Strabo, Pliny, and Mela, are sufficient to fix them in the Greater Syrtis; and as they are expressly stated by Strabo (lib. 17) to have occurred before Automala[12], in passing from west to east, we must suppose them to have existed somewhere in the tract of country just described, since the fortress of Automala is laid down by that geographer in the bottom of the gulf[13]. There is a difficulty in reconciling the accounts of Pliny and Mela on this point; for the Philænean altars are mentioned by the former of these writers as placed on the eastern boundary of the country of the Lotophagi, which he lays down in the bottom of the gulf[14]. Mela may be understood to assign the same position to the altars (although something appears wanting in the text in this part to connect the two sentences together)[15]; but then he makes the country of the Lotophagi commence at the Borion (Boreum) Promontorium, and finish at the promontory of Phycus (answering to Ras Sem), and this will place the Lotophagi far in the Cyrenaica, and out of the Gulf of Syrtis altogether, which finishes at the Boreum Promontorium.