NATUEAL HISTOEY OE PLINY. 
BOOK VI. 
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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^ Sea, which in former times had the name of 
Axenus,^ 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 
Mseotian lakes ^ 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 
Buch numbers of narrow passages formed against the will of 
^ Or the Hospitable" Sea, now the Black Sea. 
2 Or the Inhospitable." m 
3 The streams which discharge their waters into the Palus Mseotis, «r i 
Sea of Azof. 
VOL. II, B 
