Note 3421 — BOOK V. AN ACCOUNT OF COUNTRIES, NATIONS, SEAS, TOWNS, HAVENS, MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, DISTANCES, AND PEOPLES WHO NOW EXIST OR FORMERLY EXISTED.

The chief city of Cyrenaica, and the most important Hellenic colony in Africa, the early settlers having extensively intermarried with wives of Libyan parentage. In its most prosperous times it maintained an extensive commerce with Greece and Egypt, especially in silphium or assafœtida, the plantations of which, as mentioned in the present chapter, extended for miles in its vicinity. Great quantities of this plant were also exported to Capua in Southern Italy, where it was extensively employed in the manufacture of perfumes. The scene of the ‘Rudens,’ the most picturesque (if we may use the term) of the plays of Plautus, is laid in the vicinity of Cyrene, and frequent reference is made in it to the extensive cultivation of silphium; a head of which plant also appears on the coins of the place. The philosophers Aristippus and Carneades were born here, as also the poet Callimachus. Its ruins, at the modern Ghrennah, are very extensive, and are indicative of its former splendour.