BRITISH COMMERCE.
17
respecting Britain; and Strabo informs us that the great historian had actually composed a treatise on the subject of the British Islands, and the mode of preparing tin. His attention had probably been drawn to the matter by the inquiries of his friend Scipio; for Polybius, as is well known, was the companion of that celebrated general, in several of his military expeditions and other journeys. No doubt, although the people of Marseilles were unwilling or unable to satisfy the curiosity of the travellers, they obtained the information they wanted from some other quarter.[1] And in the title of this lost
- ↑ Camden has here expressed himself in a manner singularly contrasting with his customary, and, it may be justly added, characteristic accuracy. First, in order to prove "that it was late before the name of the Britons was heard of by the Greeks and Romans," he quotes a passage from Polybius, which in the original only implies that it was doubtful whether the north of Europe was entirely encompassed by the sea, but which he renders as if it asserted that nothing was known of Europe to the north of Marseilles and Narbonne at all. Polybius has, in fact, himself described many parts of Gaul to the north of these towns. Next he makes the historian to have been the friend, not of the younger, but of the elder Africanus, and to have travelled over Europe not about B.C. 150, but 370 years before Christ. Even if he had been the contemporary of the elder Scipio, this would be a monstrous mistake. The whole of this passage in Camden, however (it is in his chapter on the Manners of the Britons), is opposed to his own opinions as expressed in other parts of his work. The authority of Festus Avienus, which he here disclaims, he elsewhere makes use of very freely (see his chapter on the Scilly islands, at the end of the Britannia). And, whereas he contends here that Britain had never been heard of by the Greeks till a comparatively recent date, he has a few pages before a long argument to prove that it must have been known "to the most ancient of the Greeks." In the same chapter (on the Name of Britain) he quotes a passage from Pliny, in which that writer characterizes the island as famous in the writings (or records, as it may be translated) of the Greeks and Romans—"clara Grsecis nostrisque monumentis."
B 3
