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PEUTINGER'S CHART Showing ancient road rounding the headland and terminating at "Templum Minervae." For the structure is therein marked not at the Punta Campanella but, approximately, at Ierate itself, facing south, with the road from Stabiae over Surrentum rounding the promontory and terminating at the temple's threshold.
Did the old road from Stabiae Athene temple go round the promontory and continue as far as Ierate along the southern slope of San Costanzo hill? No temple of this magnificence can have stood here, but only a Roman villa one of the many pleasure-houses which dotted these shores under the Empire. So much for myself.
To sum up: Strabo is wrong in saying that the temple of Athene stood on the summit of Mount San Costanzo; I was wrong in thinking that this temple lay at Ierate; Peutinger's Chart is wrong in figuring the structure on the south side of the Sorrentine peninsula; Beloch is wrong in identifying the skopelos trikoruphos of Eratosthenes with Mount San Costanzo; Eratosthenes is wrong in locating his rock at the boundary between the two gulfs.
The ancients had no charts like ours, and the world in consequence presented itself differently to their senses; even Strabo, says Bunbury, "was so ignorant of the general form and configuration of the North African coast as to have no clear conception of the great projection formed by the Carthaginian territory and the deep bay to the east of it"; and, coasting along the shore line, this triple-headed skopelos, behind which lies the inlet of Ierate, might possibly be mistaken for the turning-point into the gulf of Naples.
Now this projecting cliff of three peaks they are called, respectively, Montalto, Ierate, and Mortella; Ierate for short is not the actual boundary between the two gulfs; not by a mile or more. No; but from certain points it might well be mistaken for it.
You may guess I was not a little proud of this discovery, particularly when it turned out that an ancient building actually did stand there on the southern slope, namely, of the miniature peninsula which juts into Ierate bay.
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