222 JOURNEY FROM from Augila. This is the city which we have mentioned, in speaking of Hudia, as having been inhabited by Jews of the Cyrenaica ; it was exempt from the payment of tribute and duties, and was fortified at the same time with the adjacent country, by the command of the emperor Justinian *. But the Borion Promontorium is at the same time mentioned by Pliny as the eastern extremity of the Gulf of Syrtis, as which it is also considered by Ptolemy and Strabo ; so that except we may allow that there were two places of this name, we can see no mode of reconciling so many contradictory statements. This accommodation, as we have mentioned above, appears to have been intended by CeUarius, who has marked one of his promontories at the eastern boundary of the gulf, and placed the other at the bottom of it.

We cannot quit this subject without observing that the idea which appears to have been entertained by the ancients of the soil of the Greater Syrtis, is not confirmed by an inspection of the country in question. Cato is described by Strabo as having marched his army across the Syrtis through deep and burning sands f, and Lucan has given so exaggerated an account of the same march, as to make his description almost wholly poetical Sallust also, in his account of the Philmni, describes the “ level and sandy plain, in which these monuments were erected, without either river or mountain by which they might be distinguished But there is no sandy * Vide Procopius (De iEdificiis, lib. v.)

-f- . . . coevsi Se 9TEor ev ai/.ix,u /SaSEios xasi nau/aat. — Lib. xvii. p. 836.

+ Pharsalia, lib. ix.

Ager m medio arenosus, una specie ; neque flumen, neque mons erat, qui finis eorum disceimeret, &c. — (Bell. Jugurth. 79.)