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[9]
Now the mouth is common to both, but the Ionian is different in that it is the name of the first part of this sea, whereas Adrias is the name of the inside part of the sea as far as the recess; at the present time, however, Adrias is also the name of the sea as a whole. According to Theopompus, the first name came from a man,1 a native of Issa,2 who once ruled over the region, whereas the Adrias was named after a river.3 The distance from the country of the Liburnians to the Ceraunian Mountains is slightly more than two thousand stadia Theopompus states that the whole voyage from the recess takes six days, and that on foot the length of the Illyrian country is as much as thirty days, though in my opinion he makes the distance too great.4 And he also says other things that are incredible: first, that the seas5 are connected by a subterranean passage, from the fact that both Chian and Thasian pottery are found in the Naro River; secondly, that both seas are visible from a certain mountain;6 and thirdly, when he puts down a certain one of the Liburnides islands as large enough to have a circuit of five hundred stadia;7 and fourthly, that the Ister empties by one of its mouths into the Adrias. In Eratosthenes, also, are some false hearsay statements of this kind—“popular notions,”8 as Polybius calls them when speaking of him and the other historians.
1 Ionius, an Illyrian according to the Scholiasts (quoting Theopompus) on Apollonius Argonautica 4.308) and Pind. P. 3.120.
2 The isle of Issa (7. 5. 5).
3 Called by Ptolemaeus (3. 1. 21) “Atrianus,” emptying into the lagoons of the Padus (now Po) near the city of Adria (cp. 5. 1. 8), or Atria (now Atri). This river, now the Tartara, is by other writers called the Tartarus.
4 Strabo's estimate for the length of the Illyrian seaboard, all told (cp. 7.. 5. 3-4), amounts to 5,800 stadia. In objecting to Theopompus' length of the Illyrian country on foot, he obviously wishes, among other things, to make a liberal deduction for the seaboard of the Istrian peninsula. Cp. 6. 3. 10.
5 The Adriatic and the Aegaean.
6 The Haemus (cp. 7. 5. 1).
7 The coastline of Arbo is not much short of 500 stadia. The present translator inserts “a certain one”; others emend so as to make Theopompus refer to the circuit of all the Liburnides, or insert “the least” (τὴν ἐλαχίστον), or leave the text in doubt.
8 See 2. 4. 2 and 10. 3. 5.
Strabo. ed. H. L. Jones, The Geography of Strabo. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924.
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