164 plint's natural HISTOET. [Book III. 



and some at another, and so proceed in different directions ; 

 and hence the result is, that no two accounts agree. 



(2.) At the present day the length of Bsetica, from the 

 town of Castulo\ on its frontier, to Grades is 250 miles, and 

 from Murci, which lies on the sea-coast, twenty-five miles 

 more. The breadth, measured from the coast of Carteia, is 

 234 miles. Who is there that can entertain the belief that 

 Agrippa, a man of such extraordinary diligence, and one who 

 bestowed so much care on his subject, when he proposed to 

 place before the eyes of the world a survey of that world, could 

 be guilty of such a mistake as this, and that too when seconded 

 by the late emperor the divine Augustus ? Por it was that 

 emperor who completed the Portico^ which had been begun 

 by his sister, and in which the survey was to be kept, in con- 

 formity with the plan and descriptions of M. Agrippa. 



CHAP. 4. (3.) — OP NEARER SPAIN. 



Tlie ancient form of the Nearer Spain, like that of many 

 other provinces, is somewhat changed, since the time when 

 Pompey the Grreat, upon the trophies which he erected in 

 the Pyrenees, testified that 877 towns, from the Alps to the 

 borders of the Parther Spain, had been reduced to subjection 

 by him. The whole province is now divided into seven juris- 

 dictions, those of Carthage^, of Tarraco, of Caesar Augusta'*, of 



* Now Cazlona, on the confines of New Castile and the kingdom of 

 Granada. It was a place of great importance, and the chief town of the 

 Oretani. Himiloe, the rich wife of Hannibal, was a native of this place. 



2 This was the ' porticus Octavise,' which, havmg been commenced by 

 his sister Octavia, the wife of MarceUus and Antony, was completed by 

 Augustus. It lay between the Circus Flaminius and the Theatre of Mar- 

 ceUus, occupying the site of the former portico, which had been built by 

 Q. Csecihus Metehus, and enclosing the two temples of Juno and of Ju- 

 piter Stator. It contained a pubhc hbrary, in which the Senate often 

 met, and it was in this probably that the map or plan, mentioned by 

 PUny, was deposited. It also contained a great nrmiber of statues, 

 paintings, and other works of art, which, with the hbrary, were destroyed 

 by fire in the reign of Titus. 



' Nova Carthago or New Carthage, now Carthagena. 



* Now Zaragoza or Saragossa, on the right bank of the river Ebro. Its 

 original name was Salduba, but it was changed in honour of Augustus, 

 who colonized it after the Cantabrian war, B.C. 25. 



