previous next
[7]

In addition to the places in the Chersonesus which I have enumerated, there were also the three forts which were built by Scilurus and his sons—the forts which they used as bases of operations against the generals of Mithridates—I mean Palacium, Chabum, and Neapolis.1 There was also a Fort Eupatorium,2 founded by Diophantus when he was leading the army for Mithridates. There is a cape about fifteen stadia distant from the wall of the Chersonesites;3 it forms a very large gulf which inclines towards the city. And above this gulf is situated a lagoon4 which has salt-works. And here, too, was the Ctenus Harbor. Now it was in order that they might hold out that the besieged generals of the king fortified the place, established a garrison on the cape aforesaid, and filled up that part of the mouth of the gulf which extends as far as the city, so that there was now an easy journey on foot and, in a way, one city instead of two. Consequently, they could more easily beat off the Scythians. But when the Scythians made their attack, near Ctenus, on the fortified wall that extends across the isthmus, and daily filled up the trench with straw, the generals of the king set fire by night to the part thus bridged by day, and held out until they finally prevailed over them. And today everything is subject to whatever kings of the Bosporians the Romans choose to set up.

1 The sites of these forts are unknown, but they must have been not far from the line of fortifications which ran along the eastern boundary of the Little Chersonesus (see 7. 4. 2).

2 For Eupatorium is not to be identified with the city of Eupatoria (mentioned by Ptolemaeus 3.6.2), nor with the modern Eupatoria (the Crimean Kozlof). It was situated on what is now Cape Paul, where Fort Paul is, to the east of Sebastopol (Becker, Jahrb. für Philol., Suppl. vol., 1856), or else on the opposite cape between the harbor of Sebastopol and what is called Artillery Bay, where Fort Nicholas was (C. Müller, note on Ptolemaeus, l.c.).

3 i.e., the wall of the city of New Chersonesus.

4 Now Uschakowskaja Balka (Pauly-Wissowa, s.v. “Eupatoria”).

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1877)
load focus English (H.C. Hamilton, Esq., W. Falconer, M.A., 1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (5 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: