Pliny: Natural History, Vol. II

PLINY: NATURAL HISTORY

any history, and that though their names are mentioned, it is only as forming a portion of the world and of the natural universe.

3 The whole circuit of the earth is divided into three parts: Europe, Asia, and Africa. The starting point is in the west, at the Straits of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic Ocean bursts in and spreads out into the inland seas. On the right as you enter from the ocean is Africa, on the left Europe, with Asia between them; the boundaries are the river Tanais the Don and the river Nile. The ocean straits mentioned are fifteen miles long and five miles broad, from the village of Mellaria in Spain to the White Cape probably Punta del Sarinas in Africa, as given by Turranius Gracilis, a native of the neighbourhood. 4 Livy and Cornelius Nepos state the breadth at the narrowest point as seven miles and at the widest as ten miles: so narrow is the mouth through which pours so boundless an expanse of water. Nor is it of any great depth, so as to lessen the marvel, for recurring streaks of whitening shoal-water terrify passing keels; and consequently many have called this place the threshold of the Mediterranean. At the narrowest part of the straits, mountains on either side enclose the channel, Abyla in Africa and Calpe Gibraltar in Europe, the limits of the labours of Hercules. Consequently, the inhabitants call them the pillars of that deity, and believe that he cut the channel through them and thereby let in the sea which had hitherto been shut out, so altering the face of nature.

5 To begin then with Europe, nurse of the race that has conquered all the nations, and by far the loveliest portion of the earth, which most authorities, not without reason, have reckoned to be not a third part but a

half of the world, dividing the whole circle into two portions by a line drawn from the river Tanais to the Straits of Gibraltar. The ocean, pouring the Atlantic sea through the passage I have described, and in its eager progress overwhelming all the lands that shrank in awe before its coming, washes also those that offer resistance with a winding and broken coastline: Europe especially it hollows out with a succession of bays, but into four chief gulfs, of which the first bends in a vast curve from the Rock of Gibraltar—which, as I have said, is the extremity of Spain—right to Locri on Cape Spartivento.