previous next
[23]

Among the mountains which are most celebrated, are the Hymettus, Brilessus, Ly$cabettus, Parnes, and Corydallus.1 Near the city are excellent quarries of Hymettian and Pentelic marble. The Hymettus produces also the finest honey. The silver mines in Attica were at first of importance, but are now exhausted. The workmen, when the mines yielded a bad return to their labour, committed to the furnace the old refuse and scoria, and hence obtained very pure silver, for the former workmen had carried on the process in the furnace unskilfully.

Although the Attic is the best of all the kinds of honey, yet by far the best of the Attic honey is that found in the country of the silver mines,2 which they call acapniston, or unsmoked, from the mode of its preparation.

1 Monte San Giorgio.

2 As Mount Hymettus was always celebrated for producing the best honey, it would appear from this passage that there were silver mines in it. It appears however that the Athenians had failed to discover silver in Hymettus. It is not impossible that Strabo has adopted literally some proverb or saying of the miners, such as, ‘Ours is the best honey.’

The Geography of Strabo. Literally translated, with notes, in three volumes. London. George Bell & Sons. 1903.

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 (1924)
hide References (11 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: