12.

Eratosthenes, though on no sufficient grounds for so doing, rejects both these opinions, endeavouring in his attack on the latter, to refute by lengthened arguments what is manifestly absurd and unworthy of consideration, and in regard to the former, maintaining a poet to be a mere gossip, to whose worth an acquaintance with science or geography could not add in the least degree: since the scenes of certain of Homer’s fables are cast in actual localities, as Ilium,109 Pelion,110 and Ida;111 others in purely imaginary regions, such as those of the Gorgons and Geryon. “Of this latter class,” he says, “are the places mentioned in the wanderings of Ulysses, and those who pretend that they are not mere fabrications of the poet, but have an actual existence, are proved to be mistaken by the differences of opinion existing among themselves: for some of them assert that the Sirenes of Homer are situated close to Pelorus,112 and others that they are more than two thousand stadia distant,113 near the Sirenussæ,114 a three-peaked rock which separates the Gulfs of Cumæa and Posidonium.” Now, in the first place, this rock is not three-peaked, nor does it form a crest at the summit at all, but a long and narrow angle reaching from the territory of Surrentum115 to the Strait of Capria,116 having on one side of the mountain the temple of the Sirens, and on the other side, next the Gulf of Posidonium, three little rocky and uninhabited islands, named the Sirenes; upon the strait, is situated the Athenæum, from which the rocky angle itself takes its name.