Page:Arrian's Voyage Round the Euxine Sea Translated.djvu/54

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DISSERTATION.

At or near this temple, an anchor of iron was ſhewn, which was reported to have belonged to the ſhip Argo; which Arrian very juſtly rejects as ſpurious, ſince anchors of ſtone only were in uſe at that early period. The fragments of a ſtone anchor, which was reported to have belonged to the ſame ſhip, are properly determined by him to be more probably genuine. Perhaps theſe fragments might be the remains of the anchor, which the Argonauts brought from Cyzicus, where, as Apollonius tells us, they exchanged a ſmall ſtone anchor for a larger of the ſame kind. It is remarkable that Apollonius [1] notices, that the old anchor was laid up as a ſacred depoſit in a temple at Cyzicus, as probably the fragments of the new were prebſerved in the time of Arrian in the temple of Cybele. The cattle at the mouth of the river appears to have been regularly fortified as a frontier place. He notices, that it was built of baked brick (πλίνθου ὀπτῆς), a circumſtance particularly mentioned to diſtinguiſh it from ſun-dried brick, which formed the walls of many of the cities and in Aſia Minor, and, as it ſhould ſeem, even in Greece.[2] Xenophon obſerves, that the wall of Media, which extended from the Euphrates to the Tigris, was built of burnt brick, in oppoſition to raw brick. Herodotus notices, that the walls of Babylon were, in like manner, conſtructed of burnt bricks. Pauſanias, ſpeaking of the walls of Mantinea, which were deſtroyed by Ageſipolis, who turned the ſtream of the river Ophis againſt them, tells us, that they were ὠμῆς ᾠκοδομημένης τῆς πλίνθου, built of raw or crude bricks, which, he ſays, diſſolved by water [3], as wax does by the fun.

  1. Argon. lib. i. ver. 955.
  2. Anabail lib. ii. p. 145. Ed. Hutch. 8vo.
  3. Pauſan. lib. viii.
Arrian