All the ports which it was prudent or necessary, for
the safety of the voyage, to touch at, in sailing from Achaia to Africa are
enumerated; and of these there are no fewer than twenty, some of them at
the heads of bays on the coasts of Greece, Epirus, and Italy, and within
the Straits of Sicily as far as Messina. Their course was then to be
directed along the east and south coasts of Sicily to the west point of it;
from an island off this point they took their departure for the coast of
Africa, a distance of about ninety miles.
These Itineraries undoubtedly were drawn up in as accurate a manner as
possible; but till the time of Ptolemy they were of little service to
geography or commerce, as, for a private individual to have one in his
possession was deemed a crime little short of high treason. Geography as a
science, therefore, had hitherto made little advances; indeed the discovery
and example of Hipparchus, of reducing it to astronomical basis, seems to
have been forgotten or neglected till the middle of the second century. The
first after him, who attempted to fix geography on the base of science was
Marinus, of Tyre, who lived a short time before Ptolemy; of his work we
have only extracts given by this geographer. He divided the terms latitude
and longitude, which, as we have already stated, were introduced by
Artemidorus (A.
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