Note 2937 — THE PLACE OF CAESAR’S LANDING IN BRITAIN

Mr. H. E. Malden (Journal of Philology, xxii, 1894, p. 168) remarks that the words cuius loci haec erat natura atque ita montibus angustis mare continebatur uti ex locis superioribus in litus telum adigi posset have been ‘taken as applying to old Dover harbour’. It is true that they have been taken in this sense by commentators who were ignorant of the meaning of angustis; but even if they could be interpreted as meaning a creek or inlet hemmed in by precipitous heights, they could not apply to ‘old Dover harbour’, which occupied part of the Priory Valley, and was never hemmed in by ‘precipitous heights’. Hoffmann unnecessarily conjectures that Caesar wrote not angustis but anguste.