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IN the book de Mundo, which is ascribed to Aristotle, the British islands are mentioned, with their specific names, Albion and Ierne.

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THE Voyage of Pytheas, which was in existence in the fifth century, must have transmitted much information to the Greeks concerning our islands. He seems to have lived about the time of Aristotle.10 He sailed from Marseilles, where he made an observation to determine its latitude, which enabled Eratosthenes and Hipparchus to calculate it with a precision which modern astronomers have found exact. He coasted Spain, Portugal, and France, into the British Channel. He passed along the eastern shore of Britain, to the north, till he reached the island which he has called Thule. He is the first navigator that penetrated so far into the Northern Ocean. After this, he made a voyage to the German Ocean; passed the Sound into the Baltic Sea, and sailed on to a river, which he thought the Tanais, the boundary of Europe.1

In

"Is, qui Argonautica et Hymnos Orpheo subjecit, sive Onomacritus fuerit, ut plures traducit, sive alius, scriptor certe meo judicio Vetustissimus est; in quo quamvis animum diligenter attenderim ne levissimum quidem recentioris ætatis vestigium reperi; contra, proba omnia et antiquitatem redolentia." Epist. Crit. 2. p. 128. ed. 1782.

9 He is quoted by Stephanius, Voc. waves, who lived at this period.

10 See M. Bougainville's very able Memoir on his Life and Voyages. Mem. Ac. des Inscript. v. xxx. p. 285.

i Bougainville, p. 289. Pytheas referred the cause of the tides to the agency of the moon. Plut. de placit. Phil. His description of the stars in the north was cited with approbation by Hipparchus, in his Commentary on Aratus.

12 Bougainville has collected the passages from Pytheas' voyage, in Strabo and Pliny, which express these circumstances; and has vindicated him from the angry invectives of Strabo,

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all his course, he made many observations on the CHAP. climate, the people, and the productions of the countries he visited, of which only a very few fragments have descended to us; and it is evident, from what has been transmitted to us of his opinions, that Britain was a principal object of his examination. 13

IN the third book of his history, Polybius has intimated that the British islands, and the manner of making tin, would be one of his subjects for a future composition. 14 His friend, the great Scipio, made enquiries concerning Britain 15, of the merchants of Narbonne and Marseilles; but though he could obtain, from their ignorance or their jealousy, nothing worthy of memory, yet, as Polybius mentions that many authors before him had treated fully, though variously, on this and the other subjects which he postpones; and as he himself had travelled through Spain and Gaul, and had sailed over the ocean which bounds them 16; the remarks of an author, so inquisitive and judicious, would have been an invaluable present to our curiosity. If they were ever written ", time has

who, though occasionally erring himself, is very unsparing in his censure of Pytheas.

13 See Pliny, lib. ii. c. 77. & c. 99.; lib. iv. c. 27. & c. 30.; and Strabo, p. 163. and 175. Pytheas has had a singular fortune: he has been attacked by Strabo and Polybius; and followed by Eratosthenes and Hipparchus.

14 Hist. lib. iii. c. 5.

15 Strabo, lib. iv. p. 289.

16 Polybius, lib. iii. c. 5.

17 In speaking of the British islands, Polybius rather expresses a treatise which he had it in his contemplation to compose, than one which he had made. From this passage, it is not certain, whether he fulfilled his intentions; and yet some allusions of Strabo seem to have been taken from such a work.

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BOOK deprived us of them. We have equally lost the works of Timæus, Isidorus, Artemidorus, Messenius, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, and Posidonius, who are all mentioned to have noticed the British islands. 18 INDEED it is evident that the Grecian geographers directed their attention to the northern and western parts of Europe. Cæsar mentions, that the great Hercynian forest of Germany was known to Eratosthenes, and some other Grecians, who called it Orcynia.19 But that Grecian colonies were in Britain, cannot be believed on the vague intimation of St. Jerome.20 That Hiero, King of Sicily, had the main-mast of his ship from England, rests on a passage in Atheneus 21, which has been thought corrupted; because a sentence of Polybius, if it had not been corrected, would have made

18 Pliny, lib. iv. c. 30. Strabo, lib. ii. p. 163. ; lib. iv. p. 304.; lib.i. p.111. We find from Tacitus, Vit. Agr., that Livy and Fabius Rusticus, " eloquentissimi auctores," had also treated of Britain before him.

19 Cæsar, lib. vi. c. 22.

20 St. Jerome in his questions on Genesis referring to Varro Sisinius Capito and Phlegon, but without giving their precise words, says, that the Greeks possessed all the sea coasts from the mountains Amanus and Taurus to the British Ocean. But these writers most probably meant no more than the Grecian colony at Marseilles.

21 Athenæus describes at length the celebrated ship which Archimedes made for Hiero, because he had just read very carefully the book which Moschion had written upon it. After giving a full detail of its various parts, he comes to its masts. He says, the second and third were easily found, but the first was obtained with difficulty. It was found by a herdsman, εν τοις ορεσιν της Βρεττανίας, and Phileas the Tauromenian, the mechanist, brought it down to the sea. Deip. lib. v. p. 208. Camden suggests that this may be a corruption for Bρettiavng, or Βρεττιανης, the Brutii in Italy.

Hannibal to have fought in Britain. 22 stories are mere random fictions. 23

Later Greek CHAP. But that Bri

tain was at least in the recollection of the Romans before Cæsar, is obvious from the passage of Lucretius which alludes to it.24 The remarks of Dion Cassius and of Diodorus, express the real state of the question as to the actual intercourse of the Grecians and Romans with Britain. 25

It is well known, that Jeffrey of Monmouth, who diffused in the twelfth century that history of Britain which in former times so much occupied the public mind, deduces the first colonization of Britain from a Trojan source; from Brutus, the son of Æneas, who, after wandering through the sea, and landing in Gaul, finally settled in this

22 The corrupt passage of Polybius occurs in the eclogue of the 11th book. The corruption here is manifest, as Camden has remarked. The passage applies wholly to Italy.

23 There have been some absurd fancies about the earlier intercourse of the Greeks and Romans with Britain. That Alexander the Great came from Cadiz to Britain, or that British kings made presents to Cato the Elder, in approbation of his virtue, as Cedrenus and J. Tzetzes mentions, are circumstances which show that the introduction of romance into history did not originate merely from our minstrels

24" Nam quid Britannium cœlum differre putamus

Et quod in Ægypto est, qua mundi claudicat axis." Luc. 25 Dion says, "Its existence was not known to the earliest Greeks and Romans, and to the more recent it was a doubt whether it was a continent or an island. But though several maintained each opinion, they had no actual knowledge about it, as they neither saw the island themselves nor conversed with its natives," lib. xxxix. p. 127. Diodorus remarks, "Anciently it remained untouched by foreign powers; for we have not heard that either Bacchus or Hercules, or any of the other heroes, reigned in it," lib. iv. p. 300. Mela's opinion is, that Cæsar subdued in it tribes, not only unconquered before, but even unknown, lib. iii. p. 263.

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BOOK island. The same story is in the Welsh Chronicles, I. which are ascribed to Tyssilio, and supposed, though too gratuitously, to have been Jeffrey's originals.

Nor a line of history can be written from a work so obviously fabulous as the composition, or, as he describes it, the translation from Breton manuscripts, of Jeffrey. But the curious student may fairly ask, did this Trojan story originate with Jeffrey, or had it an earlier origin? A few observations will be sufficient on the subject.

It appears from Nennius, who wrote in the ninth century, that the opinion of this descent was in Britain in his time; for he mentions an outline of that story, which Jeffrey has so much amplified and dramatised.

TALIESIN, in his poems, frequently mentions Troy, and seems to allude to the tradition of such a descent." All this is too vague for history. But it is remarkable, that there should have been in Europe several traditions connected both with the conquerors and the conquered, in that celebrated warfare which Homer has immortalized. 28

26 Nennius professes to derive his account from the annals of the Romans. It is briefly this: Brutus was the grandson of Ascanius, the son of Eneas. Driven from Italy and the Tyrrhenian Sea, he went to Gaul, and founded Tours, and thence came to this island, gave it his name, and peopled it about the time that Eli was the judge in Israel, c. 33.

27 See Welsh Archaiology, vol.i.

28 Thus Tacitus mentions the opinion of the Germans, that Ulysses was driven into the Northern Ocean, and built there Asciburgum; and that an altar dedicated to Ulysses, with the name of Laertes his father, had been found there, De Mor. Germ. s. 3. Solinus notices a tradition of Ulysses having reached a bay in Caledonia; " which," he adds, "an altar with a Greek inscription shows," c. 22. A Trojan colony is stated