It seems to be with the intention of reconciling these accounts in some degree, that Cellarius has placed a Boreum Promontorium and Oppidum in the bottom of the gulf. And he is indeed somewhat justified in doing so, by the position assigned to a city called Boreum (βοριον) by Procopius, which is mentioned by that writer as the most western city of the Pentapolis, and distant about four days from Augila. This is the city which we have mentioned, in speaking of Hudīa, as having been inhabited by Jews of the Cyrenaica; it was exempt from the payment of tribute and duties, and was fortified at the same time with the adjacent country, by the command of the emperor Justinian[16]. But the Borion Promontorium is at the same time mentioned by Pliny as the eastern extremity of the Gulf of Syrtis, as which it is also considered by Ptolemy and Strabo; so that except we may allow that there were two places of this name, we can see no mode of reconciling so many contradictory statements. This accommodation, as we have mentioned above, appears to have been intended by Cellarius, who has marked one of his promontories at the eastern boundary of the gulf, and placed the other at the bottom of it. We cannot quit this subject without observing that the idea which appears to have been entertained by the ancients of the soil of the Greater Syrtis, is not confirmed by an inspection of the country in question. Cato is described by Strabo as having marched his army across the Syrtis through deep and burning sands[17], and Lucan has given so exaggerated an account of the same march, as to make his description almost wholly poetical[18]. Sallust also, in his account of the Philæni, describes the “level and sandy plain, in which these monuments were erected, without either river or mountain by which they might be distinguished[19]”. But there is no sandy plain of this description in the bottom of the Syrtis; and, although there is no river, there are certainly mountains, if hills of solid stone, of from four to six hundred feet in height, may be entitled to that distinction. It is true that the chain of hills at the bottom of the gulf run in an east and westerly direction, and might not, on that account, be well calculated for objects by which limits in the same direction might be ascertained; but the account given by Sallust would lead us to imagine (as it seems to have done Signor Della Cella) that the place was without any inequalities of this nature whatever.