Alone By Norman Douglas













































































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So much for Peutinger's Tables. 

Beloch makes a further confusion in regard to the local topography. He
says that the - Page 100
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So Much For Peutinger's Tables.

Beloch makes a further confusion in regard to the local topography. He says that the "three-peaked rock" which Eratosthenes describes as separating the gulfs of Cumae and Paestum (that is, of Naples and Salerno) is Mount San Costanzo. I do not understand Beloch falling into this error, for the old geographer uses the term skopelos, which is never applied to a mountain of this size, but to cliffs projecting upon the sea. Moreover, the landmark is there to this day. I have not the slightest doubt that Eratosthenes meant the pinnacle of Ierate, which is three-peaked in a remarkably, and even absurdly, conspicuous manner, both when viewed from the sea and from the land (from the chapel of S. M. della Neve, for instance).

Now this projecting cliff of three peaks - they are called, respectively, Montalto, Ierate, and Mortella; Ierate for short - is not the actual boundary between the two gulfs; not by a mile or more. No; but from certain points it might well be mistaken for it. The ancients had no charts like ours, and the world in consequence presented itself differently to their senses; even Strabo, says Bunbury, "was so ignorant of the general form and configuration of the North African coast as to have no clear conception of the great projection formed by the Carthaginian territory and the deep bay to the east of it"; and, coasting along the shore line, this triple-headed skopelos, behind which lies the inlet of Ierate, might possibly be mistaken for the turning-point into the gulf of Naples. So it looks when viewed from the S.E. of Capri; so also from the Siren islets - a veritable headland.

So much for Beloch and Eratosthenes.

To sum up: Strabo is wrong in saying that the temple of Athene stood on the summit of Mount San Costanzo; I was wrong in thinking that this temple lay at Ierate; Peutinger's Chart is wrong in figuring the structure on the south side of the Sorrentine peninsula; Beloch is wrong in identifying the skopelos trikoruphos of Eratosthenes with Mount San Costanzo; Eratosthenes is wrong in locating his rock at the boundary between the two gulfs.

The shrine of Athene lay doubtless at Campanella, whose crag is of sufficient altitude to justify Roman poets like Statius in their descriptions of its lofty site. So great a number of old writers concur in this opinion - Donnorso, Persico, Giannettasio, Mazzella, Anastasio, Capaccio - that their testimony would alone be overwhelming, had these men been a little more careful as to what they called a "temple." Capasso, the acutest modern scholar of these regions, places it "in the neighbourhood of the Punta Campanella." Professor Pais, in 1900, wrote a paper on this "Atene Siciliana" which I have not seen. The whole question is discussed in Filangieri's recent history of Massa (1908-1910). It also occurs to me that Strabo's term akron may mean an extremity or point projecting into the sea (a sense in which Homer used it), and be applicable, therefore, to the Punta Campanella.

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