NATURAL HISTORY OF PLINY. 



BOOK VI. 



AN ACCOUNT OF COUNTRIES, NATIONS, SEAS, TOWNS, 

 HAVENS, MOT'NTAINS, 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 

 Axcnus, 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 de- 

 prived 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 

 Ma3otian 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 



1 Or the " Hospitable" Sea, now the Black Sea. 



2 Or the " Inhospitable." 



3 The streams which discharge their waters into the Palus Mseotis, er 

 Sea of Azof. 



VOL. II. B 



