XVI.] HIS MAPS. 345
the longest day at each, and, for those that were situated within
the tropics, the course of the sun with respect to them. It is a
difficult matter to decide whether we still possess
the actual maps which Ptolemy constructed. Such His Maps*
maps are found in some of the manuscripts of his work, and are
there attributed to one Agathodaemon of Alexandria; but since
nothing further is known about that person, it is impossible to
determine whether he was a contemporary of the geographer, who
delineated them under his supervision, or whether he reconstructed
them several centuries later, when owing to the negligence of
copyists the original ones had been omitted from the text. The
question is less important than it would otherwise be, because, as
we have remarked, the instructions which Ptolemy has provided
furnish the means of reproducing them, and this task has been
accomplished by various scholars from the fifteenth century
onwards.
When we proceed to examine Ptolemy's map of the world in
detail, we discover that, while he has corrected
His Correc-
certain mistakes which defaced the maps of his pre- tions of Pre-
decessors, he has introduced several serious errors of V10US Maps>
his own. The great southward extension which Strabo attributed
to the promontory of Sunium is now avoided, and Taenarum is
rightly treated as the southernmost point of the Peloponnese.
The eastern coast of Africa is no longer represented as turning
towards the west after passing Cape Guardafui; and, what is still
more important, the Caspian, which ever since the time of Alex-
ander the Great had been regarded as an inlet from the ocean, is
once more recognised as being, what Herodotus had believed it to
be, an inland sea. On the other hand, Ptolemy
advances the Palus Maeotis and the mouth of the
Tanais much too far towards the north—as high, in
fact, as the southern shore of the Baltic. In India, he ignores the
discoveries which had been embodied in the Periplus Marts
Erythraei) and places the southernmost point of the peninsula
only four degrees south of Barygaza. The size of the island of
Taprobane, which had been over-estimated by earlier writers, is
exaggerated by him to an enormous degree, so that he makes it
about fourteen times as large as the reality. But these mistakes