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They knew the harbourless character of the African coast west of Egypt, and the dangers of the Lesser and Greater Syrtes. They knew the fertility of the Tunisian projection, the excellence of its harbours, and the prolificness of the large island that lay directly opposite. Here were the tracts where they might expand freely, and which would richly repay their occupation of them.
Ciramacia is to the west of lower Egypt, having the Mediterranean on the north, Libia Ethiopica to the south, and Syrtes Major to the west.
But, oh! how great materials for a triumph were then lost by a storm, when the Roman fleet, richly laden with spoil, and driven by contrary winds, covered with its wreck the coasts of Africa and the Syrtes, and of all the islands lying amid those seas! A great calamity!
In denoting the object or purpose, Z. 314: he coveted no appointment for the sake of display; he declined none through fear. Anxius and intentus qualify agere like adverbs cf. R. Exc. 23, 1. He conducted himself both with prudence and with energy. Exercitatior==agitatior. So Cic. Som. Scip. 4: agitatus et exercitatus animus; and Hor. Epod. 9, 31: Syrtes Noto exercitatas. Incensae coloniae.
By this road that I have described, rough and hard, stumbling here, falling there, getting up again to fall again, they reach the rank they desire, and that once attained, we have seen many who have passed these Syrtes and Scyllas and Charybdises, as if borne flying on the wings of favouring fortune; we have seen them, I say, ruling and governing the world from a chair, their hunger turned into satiety, their cold into comfort, their nakedness into fine raiment, their sleep on a mat into repose in holland and damask, the justly earned reward of their virtue; but, contrasted and compared with what the warrior undergoes, all they have undergone falls far short of it, as I am now about to show."
On the coast of Africa, there were two sand-banks, called the Greater and Lesser Syrtes, which were very much dreaded by the ancients, on account of their frequently changing places; sometimes being easily visible, and at other times considerably below the water.
To the east of Libia Ethiopica is the farther Egypt, and the sea called Ethiopicum . To the west of Rogathitus is the nation called Tribulitania , and the nation called Syrtes Minores, to the north of whom is that part of the Mediterranean called the Hadriatic.
There has been an emersion. New lands have emerged from the Atlantic wave. The desert has replaced the sea, the sebkhas, the salt lakes, the Triton lakes, the sandy Syrtes are the desolate vestiges of the free sea water over which, in former days, the fleets swept with a fair wind towards the conquest of Attica. Sand swallows up civilization better than water.
He then told us that more wrecks had happened about those square rocks, and a greater loss of body and goods, than about all the Syrtes, Scyllas and Charybdes, Sirens, Strophades, and gulfs in the universe.
And others say that they went southward, into the Red Indian Sea, and past the sunny lands where spices grow, round Æthiopia toward the west; and that at last they came to Libya, and dragged their ship across the burning sands, and over the hills into the Syrtes, where the flats and quicksands spread for many a mile, between rich Cyrene and the Lotus-eaters' shore.
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