320 
BENGAZI. 
thickly-planted fruit-trees of various kinds, and inaccessible on all 
sides. It was situated (on the authority of the same writer) at six 
hundred and twenty stadia (or fifty geographical miles) from the 
Port of Barce ; and this distance agrees precisely with that of the 
places here alluded to from Ptolemeta, the port intended by Scylax, 
as will be seen by a reference to the chart. The testimony of Pliny 
is also very decided in fixing the site of the Hesperides in the neigh- 
bourhood of Berenice. “Not far” (he says) “from the city” (Bere- 
nice is here meant) “ is the river Lethon, and the sacred grove where 
the gardens of the Hesperides are said to be situated^.” Ptolemy 
also may be supposed to intend the same position, when he informs 
us, that the garden was to the westward of the people of Barca ; or, 
what is the same thing, that the Barcitm were to the eastward of the 
garden of Hesperides f. 
The name, indeed, itself of Hesperides would induce us to place 
the Garden, so called, in the vicinity of Bengazi ; for the Hesperides 
were the early inhabitants of that part of the Cyrenaica, and Hespe- 
ris, as we have already stated, was the ancient name of the city of 
Berenice, on the site of which Bengazi is built, X and which was pro- 
bably so called by the Greeks, from the circumstance of its being the 
most western city of the district. 
* Nec procul ante oppidum fluvius Lethon, lucus sacer, ubi Hesperidum Hoi'ti me- 
morantur. — (Nat. Hist., lib. v. c. 5.) Again, in the same book, Berenice — quondam 
vocata Hesperidum, &c. 
"t" Ba^xirai azso av'xraXm rou ycmTov tcuv 'EjTra/iiJwv. 
J BEgsvDtT) V xai 'EdTra^j^sr. — (Ptol. Geogr.) : and as Stephanus describes it, in the 
singular, 'EaTragfr, ’iroKis AiSvrif, vov Bcgovijcw. 
