164 
pliky's natural histoex. 
[Book III, 
and some at anotlier, 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.) — OF KEAREE SPAIN. 
The ancient form of the Nearer Spain, like that of many 
other provinces, is somewhat changed, since the time when 
Pompey the Grreat, iipon 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. Himilce, the rich wife of Hannibal, was a native of this place. 
2 This was the ' porticus Octavise,' which, having 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. Caecihus MeteUus, and enclosing the two temples of Juno and of Ju- 
piter Stator. It contained a pubhe hbrary, in which the Senate often 
met, and it was in this probably that the map or plan, mentioned by 
Pliny, was deposited. It also contained a great number of statues, 
paintings, and other works of art, which, with the Hbrary, were destroyed 
by fire in the reign of Titus. 
3 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. 
