96. Instances of affection shown by serpents 552 97. The sleep of animals _ib._ 98. What animals are subject to dreams 553 NATURAL HISTORY OF PLINY. BOOK VI. AN ACCOUNT OF COUNTRIES, NATIONS, SEAS, TOWNS, HAVENS, MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, DISTANCES, AND PEOPLES WHO NOW EXIST, OR FORMERLY EXISTED. CHAP. 1. (1.)—THE EUXINE AND THE MARYANDINI. The Euxine[1] Sea, which in former times had the name of Axenus,[2] from the savage and inhospitable character of the nations living on its borders, by a peculiar whim of nature, which is continually giving way before the greedy inroads of the sea, lies between Europe and Asia. It was not enough for the ocean to have surrounded the earth, and then deprived us of a considerable portion of it, thus rendering still greater its uninhabitable proportion; it was not enough for it to have forced a passage through the mountains, to have torn away Calpe from Africa, and to have swallowed up a much larger space than it left untouched; it was not enough for it to have poured its tide into the Propontis through the Hellespont, after swallowing up still more of the dry land—for beyond the Bosporus, as well, it opens with its insatiate appetite upon another space of immense extent, until the Mæotian lakes[3] unite their ravening waters with it as it ranges far and wide. That all this has taken place in spite, as it were, of the earth, is manifested by the existence of so many straits and such numbers of narrow passages formed against the will of nature—that of the Hellespont,[4] being only eight hundred and seventy-five paces in width, while at the two Bospori[5] the passage across may be effected by oxen[6] swimming, a fact from which they have both derived their name. And then besides,[7] although they are thus severed, there are certain points on which these coasts stand in the relation of brotherhood towards each other—the singing of birds and the barking of dogs on the one side can be heard on the other, and an intercourse can be maintained between these two worlds by the medium even of the human voice,[8] if the winds should not happen to carry away the sound thereof. The length of the borders of the Euxine from the Bosporus to the Lake Mæotis has been reckoned by some writers at fourteen hundred and thirty-eight miles; Eratosthenes, however, says that it is one hundred less. According to Agrippa, the distance from Chalcedon to the Phasis is one thousand miles, and from that river to the Cimmerian Bosporus three hundred and sixty. We will here give in a general form the distances as they have been ascertained in our own times; for our arms have even penetrated to the very mouth of the Cimmerian Straits.