This library is built in the open.
If you spot an error, have a suggestion, or just want to say hello — we’d love to hear from you.

An ornate woodcut border frames the entire text area, featuring floral motifs, scrolls, and architectural elements.
beyond measure and custom, before the terminus arrived at that parallel to which he himself thinks it ought to come. And yet the contrary ought rather to follow. Namely, that one should believe in the possibility of a daily journey, but not grant faith to a perpetual course, whether according to equality or according to position, as it is impossible that the distance inquired after can be accepted through these means, or that it should become larger under the equinoctial line. It could have been detected more correctly by someone from those things which appear more clearly, for such would have been far more certain if one had considered more mathematically what usually happens in those regions. But since history cannot provide such things, it remains that the reasonable quantity of the emergence beyond the equinoctial line should be considered more fully from simpler things. But that can be perceived through the forms and colors of the animals which are in those places. From which it follows that the parallel through the Agisymba region, which is without controversy that of the Aethiopians, in no way reaches as far as the winter tropic, but rather terminates short of the equinoctial line. For not even among us in the opposite places, that is, under the summer tropic, do men already have the colors of the Aethiopians, nor are there rhinoceroses or elephants, but in places not much further south than them, they are moderately black. Just as those who dwell within thirty schoeni a measure of length used in Egypt and Ethiopia of Syene, such as are the Garamantes, whom Marinus says, for this reason, have their seats not under the summer tropic, nor further north, but altogether further south, in the places indeed around Meroe, they are already sufficiently black, and are the first true Aethiopians, and there the genus of elephants and more wondrous animals is pastured.
A circular diagram contains a pair of drafting compasses (dividers) pointing downwards towards an arc.
THEREFORE it is well up to this point, that is, up to the Aethiopians, just as the tradition of history about the monsters which dwell in those coasts explains to us, and it is established that the Agisymba
region and the Prassum promontory, with those things which lie under the same parallel, must be described under the one that is almost opposite to it through Meroe, that is, which is distant from the equinoctial towards the south by sixteen and one-third and one-twelfth parts, and by about 8,200 stadia. So that if the whole latitude is gathered more exactly, the parts are seventy-nine and one-third and one-twelfth, or eighty whole parts, and the stadia are 40,000. Furthermore, it must be believed that the distance which is between Leptis Magna and Garama, just as both Flaccus and Maternus supposed, is 5,400 stadia. Since the twenty days of the second journey are more shortened than the first, both to the south and to the north, when the first, because of the diversions of the days, is thirty, for those who traveled through those places very often noted the number of stadia of each day, not only because it was convenient, but also because it was necessary for the distances of the equations. Therefore, just as it is necessary to doubt great and rare journeys, especially where the measured distances do not agree, so it is fitting to believe those that are not great, but are reported unanimously and often by many travelers.
A circular diagram shows a globe or sphere with a central vertical axis and various intersecting lines representing meridians and parallels.
THEREFORE from these things it has become clearly manifest to us how far the latitude of the world can extend, but Marinus makes the longitude to be contained under two meridians, which determine the hourly intervals, fifteen, but it seems to us, and that measurement of distance also, that it extends more to the east than it ought, and indeed in this also a more reasonable contraction would be made, the longitude will not consist of twelve whole hourly intervals, when the Fortunate Islands