262 GEOGRAPHY FROM AUGUSTUS TO TRAJAN. [CHAP.
certainly the contrast which is here drawn effectively illustrates
the two points of view, scientific and practical, from which they
regarded the study of geography. In the two authors of whom
we are now speaking the absence of anything like a comprehensive
view of geography is eminently conspicuous. Of the former of
them in respect of date, Pomponius Mela, who wrote
during the reign of Claudius, there is no need to
speak at any great length, for his work was merely
a popular compendium, and would hardly have attracted much
attention had it not been the first formal treatise on the subject
that was composed in Latin. Its title is De Chorographia, and it
professes to furnish a survey of the world as it was known in his
age, while at the same time it is interspersed with notices of the
manners and customs of various peoples, which are drawn with-
out much judgment from earlier writers. With regard to the shape
of the inhabited world, and the continents and seas which diver-
sified it, his opinions differ but little from those which had been
held by his predecessors from the time of Eratosthenes, except
that he affirms the existence of antichthones. By this name he
designated the inhabitants of another continent in the south
temperate zone, which was separated from the known portion of
the globe by the ocean and by the torrid zone; and he seems to
have believed that Taprobane (Ceylon) was not an island, as was
generally thought, but formed a part of this continent. This
southern region had long been recognised as habitable, but, in
the absence of any evidence, it was mere guesswork to speak of it
as inhabited.
The method which Mela pursued in his survey resembles that
of a PeriphtS) for he follows round the coasts, first of the Mediter-
ranean, and then of the Outer sea, describing the neighbouring
countries as he passes. The islands which lie in these seas he
treats of separately. One result of this mode of dealing with the
subject is that some countries, such as Persia, Medk, and
Assyria, are excluded from consideration. As he was a native of
southern Spain, like Lucan, Seneca, and some other distinguished
writers of the early Imperial period, it is not surprising that his
notice of that country is the most valuable part of his work. Of
the Straits of Gibraltar, in particular, in the neighbourhood of