Strabo gives the circumference as three hundred and sixty stadia, and the breadth of the isthmus as sixty stadia. But this is noticed by Barth as much exaggerated (Wanderungen auf der Küste des Mittelmeers, p. 85).
[861] Appian. Reb. Punic, viii, 75.
[862] Strabo, ut sup.
[863] This is the view of Movers, sustained with much plausibility, in his learned and instructive work—Geschichte der Phœnizier, vol. ii, part ii, p. 435-455. See Diodor. xx, 55.
[864] Livy, xxix, 25. Compare the last chapter of the history of Herodotus.
[865] Diodor. xx, 17; Appian, viii, 3, 68.
[866] Colonel Leake observes, with respect to the modern Greeks, who work on the plains of Turkey, upon the landed property of Turkish proprietors—“The Helots seem to have resembled the Greeks, who labor on the Turkish farms in the plains of Turkey, and who are bound to account to their masters for one-half of the produce of the soil, as Tyrtæus says of the Messenians of his time—
Ὥσπερ ὄνοι μεγάλοις ἄχθεσι τειρόμενοι
Δεσποσύνοισι φέροντες, ἀναγκαίης ὑπὸ λυγρῆς,
Ἥμισυ πᾶν, ὅσσον κάρπον ἄρουρα φέροι.