BOOK VI
I. THE Euxine or Black Sea, formerly because of its inhospitable roughness called the Axine, owing to a peculiar jealousy on the part of Nature, which here indulges the sea's greed without any limit, actually spreads into Europe and Asia. The Ocean was not content to have encircled the earth, and with still further cruelty to have reft away a portion of her surface, nor to have forced an entrance through a breach in the mountains and rent Gibraltar away from Africa, so devouring a larger area than it left remaining, nor to have swallowed up a further space of land and flooded the Sea of Marmara through the Dardanelles; even beyond the Straits of Constantinople also it widens out into another desolate expanse, with an appetite unsatisfied until the Sea of Azov links on its own trespass to its encroachments. That this event occurred against the will of the earth is proved by the number of narrows, and by the smallness of the gaps left by Nature's resistance, measuring at the Dardanelles 875 paces, at the Straits of Constantinople and Kertsch the passage being actually fordable by oxenwhich fact gives both of them their name and also by a certain harmonious affinity contained in their disseverance, as the singing of birds and barking of dogs on one side can be heard on the other, and even the interchange of human speech, conversation going on between the two worlds, save when the actual sound is carried away by the wind.
The dimension of the Black Sea from the Dardanelles to the Sea of Azov is given by some authorities as 1438 miles, but Eratosthenes makes it 100 miles less. Agrippa gives the distance from Calchadon to the river Won as 1000 miles and from that river to the Straits of Kertsch as 360 miles. We shall state the distances in sections as ascertained in our own time, inasmuch as there has been dispute even about the mouth of the Straits of Kertsch.
Well then, after the mouth of the Dardanelles is the river Rebas, called by some the Rhesus; then Syris, and Port Calpas, and the Sakarya, a famous river which rises in Phrygia and into which flow some very large tributaries, among them the Tembrogius and the Gallus; its name is commonly given as Sagiarius; the Coralius where the Mariandyni territory begins; the bay of Heraclea, and the town of that name on the river Lycusit is 200 miles from the mouth of the Black Seathe port of Aconae, of evil repute for the poison called aconite, the Acherusian Cavern, the rivers Paedopides, Callichorus and Sonautes, the town of Tium 38 miles from Heraclea, and the river Billis.
II. Beyond this river is the Paphlagonian race, called by some the Pylaemenian, enclosed to the rear by Galatia, the Milesian town of Mastya, then Cromna, a place with which Cornelius Nepos connects the Eneti, from whom he thinks the Veneti in Italy bearing a similar name must be believed to be descended; the town of Sesamon, now called Amastris; Mount Cytorus, 63 miles from Tium; the towns of Cimolis and Stephane and the river Parthenius. The great projection of Cape Cerambis is 325 nines, or according to others 350 miles, distant from the mouth of the Black Sea, and the same distance, or, by an estimate which some prefer, 3121 miles from the Straits of Kertsch. There was formerly also a town of the same name, and then another called Armine; and at the present day there is the colony of Sinb, 164 miles from Mount Cytorus; the river Evarchus, a tribe of Cappadocians, the town of Caturia Zacepluni, and the river Halys that flows down from the base of Mount Taurus through Cataonia and Cappadocia; the towns of Gamge and Carusa, the free town of Amisus 130 miles from Sinb, and the bay of the same name which runs so far inland as to give to Asia the shape of a peninsula,b the isthmus measuring not more than 200 miles across to the Gulf of Issus in Cilicia. It is reported that in all this region there are only three races that can rightly be designated Greek, the Dorian, the Ionian and the Aeolian, all the rest being tribes of barbarians. To Amisus was attached the town of Eupatoria, founded by Mithridates; after he had been conquered, the two places were united under the name of Pompeiopolis.