[503] The modern Samarcand.
[504] Arrian and Strabo are wrong in stating that the Jaxartes rises in the Caucasus, or Hindu-Koosh. It springs from the Comedae Montes, now called Moussour. It does not flow into the Hyrcanian, or Caspian Sea, but into the Sea of Aral. It is about 900 miles long.
[505] The river Tanais, of which Herodotus speaks (iv. 45, 57), is the Don; and the Lake Maeotis, is the Sea of Azov. Cf. Strabo (vii. cc. 3 and 4).
[506] Euxeinos (kind to strangers); called before the Greeks settled upon it Axenos (inhospitable). See Ovid (Tristia, iv. 4). Cf. Ammianus (xxii. 8, 33): “A contrario per cavillationem Pontus Euxinus adpellatur, et euethen Graeci dicimus stultum, et noctem euphronen et furias Eumenidas.”
[507] So Curtius (vi. 6) makes the Don the boundary of Europe and Asia. “Tanais Europam et Asiam medius interfuit.” Ammianus says: “Tanais inter Caucasias oriens rupes, per sinuosos labitur circumflexus, Asiamque disterminans ab Europa, in stagnis Maeoticis delitescit.” The Rha, or Volga, is first mentioned by Ptolemy in the second century of the Christian era.
[508] Gadeira is now called Cadiz. The Greeks called the continent of Africa by the name of Libya. So Polybius (iii. 37) says that the Don is the boundary of Europe, and that Libya is separated from Asia and Europe respectively by the Nile and the Straits of Gibraltar, or, as he calls the latter, “the mouth at the pillars of Hercules.” Arrian here, like many ancient authors, considers Libya a part of Asia. Cf. Juvenal, x. i.
[509] Curtius (vii. 23) gives an account of the massacre by Alexander of the descendants of the Branchidae, who had surrendered to Xerxes the treasures of the temple of Apollo near Miletus, and who, to escape the vengeance of the Greeks, had accompanied Xerxes into the interior. They had been settled in Sogdiana, and their descendants had preserved themselves distinct from the barbarians for 150 years, till the arrival of Alexander. We learn from the table of contents of the 17th book of Diodorus, that that historian also gave an account of this atrocity of Alexander in the part of his history, now lost, which came after the 83rd chapter. Cf. Herodotus (i. 92, 157; v. 36); Strabo (xi. 11; xiv. 1).
[510] See Homer’s Iliad, xiii. 6. Cf. Curtius, vii. 26; Ammianus, xxiii. 6.
[511] Cf. Thucydides, ii. 97.
[512] Curtius (vii. 26) says, he sent one of his friends named Berdes on this mission.