222 
JOURNEY FROM 
from Augila. This is the city which we have mentioned, in speaking 
of Hudia, as having been inhabited by Jews of the Cyrenaica ; it was 
exempt from the payment of tribute and duties, and was fortified 
at the same time with the adjacent country, by the command of the 
emperor Justinian *. But the Borion Promontorium is at the same 
time mentioned by Pliny as the eastern extremity of the Gulf of 
Syrtis, as which it is also considered by Ptolemy and Strabo ; so that 
except we may allow that there were two places of this name, we can 
see no mode of reconciling so many contradictory statements. This 
accommodation, as we have mentioned above, appears to have been in- 
tended by CeUarius, who has marked one of his promontories at the 
eastern boundary of the gulf, and placed the other at the bottom of it. 
We cannot quit this subject without observing that the idea 
which appears to have been entertained by the ancients of the soil 
of the Greater Syrtis, is not confirmed by an inspection of the 
country in question. Cato is described by Strabo as having marched 
his army across the Syrtis through deep and burning sands f, and 
Lucan has given so exaggerated an account of the same march, as 
to make his description almost wholly poetical Sallust also, in his 
account of the Philmni, describes the “ level and sandy plain, in 
which these monuments were erected, without either river or moun- 
tain by which they might be distinguished But there is no sandy 
* Vide Procopius (De iEdificiis, lib. v.) 
-f- . . . co^evsi Se 9TE^or ev ai/.ix,u /SaSEios xasi nau/^aat. — Lib. xvii. p. 836. 
+ Pharsalia, lib. ix. 
^ Ager m medio arenosus, una specie ; neque flumen, neque mons erat, qui finis 
eorum disceimeret, &c. — (Bell. Jugurth. 79.) 
