The Geography

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[Page 5]

...according to the same qualities of the sky. The Scythians and Sarmatians who inhabit the northern parts of the Maeotian marsh [Sea of Azov] yield. He himself, therefore, reduces the number of stadia to less than half—that is, to twelve thousand stadia—as much as the winter tropic is roughly distant from the equinoctial. He gives as the causes of this section the diversions and inequality of the journeys, having set aside those reasons from which it seemed necessary not only to correct but even to reduce the number to the desired half.

First, for in the narration of the traversings, he relates that Septimius Flaccus, because he had campaigned in Libya, arrived from the Garamantes to the Ethiopians in a space of three months while traveling toward the south. Julius Maternus, indeed, from Great Leptis and from Garama together with the king of the Garamantes (to whom he had declared war against the Ethiopians), says that he himself, having set out toward the south, arrived in four months at Agisymba, the king of the Ethiopians, where the rhinoceroses congregate.

Each of these is incredible in itself: partly because the Ethiopians are not so far from the Garamantes that a space of three months is required, since the Garamantes themselves are mostly Ethiopians and are ruled under the same empire; partly because it is ridiculous that a king, through provinces subject to him, should have traveled straight from north to south, and since those nations are poured out in the longest spaces toward the rising and setting of the sun, and he did not record where he drew out noteworthy delays. From which it is not far from reason that these men either spoke hyperbolically or were understood as having gone toward the "south" or "Notus" [the south wind] by misusing the terms, rather than relying on the diligence of truth.

[Term: The same emendation from navigations.]

[Initial E]
THEN, introducing navigations between Aromata and Rhapta, he relates that a certain Diogenes, one of those who had migrated to India, when he had departed and was near Aromata, was driven by the Arctic North wind [Borea], and having the Troglodytic region to the right, in twenty-five days...

[Note: The text continues with Diogenes' 25-day journey to the lakes from which the Nile flows, and Theophilus' 20-day journey from Rhapta to Aromata. Ptolemy critiques these accounts, noting that the number of days is unreliable due to wind changes and that the resulting southern latitude would place the rhinoceroses in a frigid zone, which contradicts the natural law that similar animals and plants exist under similar celestial qualities/latitudes.]

...Marinus restricted the latitude toward the winter tropic with no reason provided for such a great contradiction... It was more appropriate to believe the daily journey was possible, but not to assent to the equality of the journeys or navigations, or that they went entirely in a straight line. It was necessary to know that the same latitude extended beyond the equinoctial...

...The reasoning itself asserts: all animals and all plants carry a similar unity under one celestial quality or temperance of air—that is, under the same parallels or sites equally distant from either pole. Wherefore Marinus...

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