[1061] Strabo, iv. p. 180.
[1062] Strabo, iv. p. 181; Cicero, De Republ. xxvii. Fragm. Vacancies in the senate seem to have been filled up from meritorious citizens generally—as far as we can judge by a brief allusion in Aristotle (Polit. vi. 7).
From another passage in the same work, it seems that the narrow basis of the oligarchy must have given rise to dissensions (v. 6). Aristotle had included the Μασσαλιωτῶν πολιτεία in his lost work Περὶ Πολιτειῶν.
[1063] Strabo, l. c. However, one author from whom Athenæus borrowed (xii. p. 523), described the Massaliots as luxurious in their habits.
[1064] Strabo, iv. p. 199. Ἔφορος δὲ ὑπερβάλλουσαν τῷ μεγέθει λέγει τὴν Κελτικὴν, ὥστε ἧσπερ νῦν Ἰβηρίας καλοῦμεν ἐκείνοις τὰ πλεῖστα προσνέμειν μέχρι Γαδείρων, φιλέλληνάς τε ἀποφαίνει τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, καὶ πολλὰ ἰδίως λέγει περὶ αὐτῶν οὐκ ἐοικότα τοῖς νῦν. Compare p. 181.
It is to be remembered that Ephorus was a native of the Asiatic Kymê the immediate neighbor of Phokæa, which was the metropolis of Massalia. The Massaliots never forgot or broke off their connection with Phokæa: see the statement of their intercession with the Romans on behalf of Phokæa (Justin, xxxvii. 1). Ephorus therefore had good means of learning whatever Massaliot citizens were disposed to communicate.
[1065] Varro, Antiq. Fragm. p. 350, ed. Bipont.
[1066] See the Fragmenta Pytheæ collected by Arfwedson, Upsal, 1824. He wrote two works—1. Γῆς Περιόδος. 2. Περὶ Ὠκεανοῦ. His statements were greatly esteemed, and often followed, by Eratosthenes; partially followed by Hipparchus; harshly judged by Polybius, whom Strabo in the main follows. Even by those who judge him most severely, Pytheas is admitted to have been a good mathematician and astronomer (Strabo, iv. p. 201)—and to have travelled extensively in person. Like Herodotus, he must have been forced to report a great deal on hearsay; and all that he could do was to report the best hearsay information which reached him. It is evident that his writings made an epoch in geographical inquiries; though they doubtless contained numerous inaccuracies. See a fair estimate of Pytheas in Mannert, Geog. der Gr. und Römer, Introd. i. p. 73-86.
The Massaliotic Codex of Homer, possessed and consulted among others by the Alexandrine critics, affords presumption that the celebrity of Massalia as a place of Grecian literature and study (in which character it competed with Athens towards the commencement of the Roman empire) had its foundations laid at least in the third century before the Christian era.
[1067] Aristotle, Politic. v. 2, 11; v. 5, 2.