320 BENGAZI.

thickly-planted fruit-trees of various kinds, and inaccessible on all sides. It was situated (on the authority of the same writer) at six hundred and twenty stadia (or fifty geographical miles) from the Port of Barce ; and this distance agrees precisely with that of the places here alluded to from Ptolemeta, the port intended by Scylax, as will be seen by a reference to the chart. The testimony of Pliny is also very decided in fixing the site of the Hesperides in the neighbourhood of Berenice. “Not far” (he says) “from the city” (Berenice is here meant) “ is the river Lethon, and the sacred grove where the gardens of the Hesperides are said to be situated.” Ptolemy also may be supposed to intend the same position, when he informs us, that the garden was to the westward of the people of Barca ; or, what is the same thing, that the Barcitm were to the eastward of the garden of Hesperides f.

The name, indeed, itself of Hesperides would induce us to place the Garden, so called, in the vicinity of Bengazi ; for the Hesperides were the early inhabitants of that part of the Cyrenaica, and Hesperis, as we have already stated, was the ancient name of the city of Berenice, on the site of which Bengazi is built, X and which was probably so called by the Greeks, from the circumstance of its being the most western city of the district.

* Nec procul ante oppidum fluvius Lethon, lucus sacer, ubi Hesperidum Hoi'ti memorantur. — (Nat. Hist., lib. v. c. 5.) Again, in the same book, Berenice — quondam vocata Hesperidum, &c.

"t" Baxirai azso av'xraXm rou ycmTov tcuv 'EjTra/iiJwv.

J BEgsvDtT) V xai 'EdTrajsr. — (Ptol. Geogr.) : and as Stephanus describes it, in the singular, 'EaTragfr, ’iroKis AiSvrif, vov Bcgovijcw.