272 GEOGRAPHY FROM AUGUSTUS TO TRAJAN. [CHAP.
In this way a community of origin may possibly have been
assigned to the two great streams. The geographical feature
which has been mentioned could hardly have failed to attract
attention, because the pass between Kurdistan and Armenia, at
the head of which this marsh is situated, has in all ages been an
important line of communication. As to the passage in Sallust,
which is our principal authority on the subject—though we are
not told in what part of his works it occurred, yet, as that writer
composed a history of the campaigns of Lucullus in Asia, which
were partly carried on in Armenia, it seems probable that it was
introduced in this. We know, moreover, that during the campaign
of 68 B.C., Lucullus passed this watershed on his way from
Tigranocerta to the upper valley of the Euphrates1, so that
information about the river-courses might have been obtained on
that occasion, and in that case would easily have come to the
knowledge of Sallust, who was a contemporary of Lucullus. If
these facts are worthy of any attention, as a possible explanation
of the fable which afterwards became so popular, they may also
perhaps form the groundwork of the story in Pliny.
Another region, of which hitherto the Greeks and Romans
piin 'sin- had °nly heard throu£h vaSLie rumours, and about
formation which Pliny had something more like authentic
about Tapro- information to communicate, is the island of
Taprobane (Ceylon). He tells us that in the
reign of Claudius a freedman of one Annius Plocamus, who
farmed the customs duties on the Red Sea, when sailing along
the coast of Arabia was caught by a storm, and at the end of
fifteen days reached the port of Hippuri in that island There he
was hospitably received by the king, and in the course of a stay of
six months became sufficiently acquainted with the language of
the country to be able to communicate with the natives. The
king appears to have been greatly impressed by discovering that
the denarii which were found on the person of his strange visitor,
though struck in the reigns of different emperors, as the heads
Ambassadors uPon them shewed, were all of equal weight From
seutthence to this circumstance he inferred that the administration
of the Roman empire by which they were issued
1 Mommsen, History of Rome, vol. 4.pt. i, pp. 69, 70 (Eng. trans.).