[220] Certainly having suffered many things, and having wandered much, I was brought in my ships, and I returned in the eighth year; having wandered to Cyprus, and Phœnice, and the Egyptians, I came to the Ethiopians and Sidonians, and Erembians, and Libya. Odyssey iv. 81.
[221] On the coasts of the Mediterranean.
[222] Strabo intends to say that the ships of Menelaus were not constructed so as to be capable of being taken to pieces, and carried on the backs of the sailors, as those of the Ethiopians were.
[223] Having mentioned the Phœnicians, amongst whom the Sidonians are comprised, he certainly would not have enumerated these latter as a separate people.
[224] That is to say, that he made the entire circuit of Africa, starting from Cadiz, and doubling the Cape of Good Hope. Such was the opinion of Crates, who endeavoured to explain all the expressions of Homer after mathematical hypotheses. If any one were to inquire how Menelaus, who was wandering about the Mediterranean, could have come into Ethiopia, Crates would answer, that Menelaus left the Mediterranean and entered the Atlantic, whence he could easily travel by sea into Ethiopia. In this he merely followed the hypothesis of the mathematicians, who said that the inhabited earth in all its southern portion was traversed by the Atlantic Ocean, and the other seas contiguous thereto.
[225] The Isthmus of Suez. This isthmus they supposed to be covered by the sea, as Strabo explains further on.
[226] Thus far he, collecting much property and gold, wandered with his ships. Odyssey iii. 301.
[227] Odyssey iv. 83.
[228] Strabo here appears to have followed Aristotle, who attributes to Sesostris the construction of the first canal connecting the Mediterranean, or rather the Pelusiac branch of the Nile, with the Red Sea. Pliny has followed the same tradition. Strabo, Book xvii., informs us, that other authors attribute the canal to Necho the son of Psammeticus; and this is the opinion of Herodotus and Diodorus. It is possible these authors may be speaking of two different attempts to cut this canal. Sesostris flourished about 1356 years before Christ, Necho 615 years before the same era. About a century after Necho, Darius the son of Hystaspes made the undertaking, but desisted under the false impression that the level of the Red Sea was higher than that of the Mediterranean. Ptolemy Philadelphus proved this to be an error, by uniting the Red Sea to the Nile without causing any inundation. At the time of Trajan and Hadrian the communication was still in existence, though subsequently it became choked up by an accumulation of sand. It will be remembered that a recent proposition for opening the canal was opposed in Egypt on similar grounds.
[229] Mount El Kas.