It runs as follows: “Timæus the historian says that the island of Mictis is distant inwards from Britain six days’ voyage, in which the tin is produced (proveniat, others read veniat), and that the Britons sail to it in vessels made of wicker-work covered with hide.”[1] We shall have to discuss this passage at greater length later on, but for our immediate purpose it is enough to point out that whether Timæus is quoting from Pytheas or not, already in the time of Pytheas the Greeks were aware of the British tin trade. This is supported by a passage in the pseudo-Aristotelian Book of Wonderful Stories, which, with others, is regarded as a genuine fragment of Aristotle by Bekker (Fragm., 248). In it we have mention of Keltic tin (τὸυ κασσίτερον τὸν Κελτικὸν τήκεοθαί φαδι πόλυ τάχιον τοῦ μολύβδου). If this be really Aristotle’s, at first sight we might found on it an argument of considerable force to show that there was a trade in tin across Gaul from Britain before the voyage of Pytheas, especially as it is commonly held that the term Κελτικὴ was confined to that part of Gaul which lay to the north of the Loire. Mr. Elton, for example, builds on this assumption his interpretation of the aim of the explorations of Pytheas. “In a short time,” he writes (page 25), they (i.e., Pytheas and his companions) arrived “at the mouth of the Loire, then the northern boundary of the Iberian population and the limit of the Celtic advance. Here Pytheas declared, and was afterwards followed by Artemidorus, that it would have been far easier to have come to Celtica by the overland route from Marseilles than to have undertaken the difficult and tedious voyage by sea.”
Even though Mr. Elton’s assumption as to Celtica were right, whatever may be the meaning of the famous sentence which he has paraphrased, it certainly cannot be
