Strabo

That's the amount of money that Paul's family had.

Not only that he was trained in Thassos, that we know from Strabo in the ancient near world, that Paul's education was the most elite education that some philosophers compared it to the education in Alexandria.

So that means, not only does it come from Duke, that has crazy money, he went to Cambridge, and went to Oxford, and went to Harvard.

So you can say, as a poor Nigerian, it's because they gave birth to him in that family.

But from what part of Gaul they came, it is more difficult to determine.

Strabo thought that the Tectosages came from Gallio Nabonensis, and that the remainder were Celtae, and this opinion has been generally adopted.

But as Pliny enumerates the Ebaeni among the Tectosagi, and as it is universally agreed that they were allied to the Tolistobogi, who dwelt on the banks of the Rhine, I think it more probable that they were Belgians, whose territory extended from a very distant part of the course of the Rhine to the English Channel.

The Tolistobogi inhabited that part which receives from its present inhabitants the names of Cleves and Brabant.

Around the first century BCE, the dates truly are nebulous due to the original text being lost to the sands of time.

But what we do have is a Greek geographer, Strabo, who made some, uh, astute observations.

Looking at fossilized marine shells far inland, he argued that the Earth's surface rises and falls, and that land, once submerged, can be heaved upward, and that land can sink.

Moving forward to seventy-nine AD, we come back to Pliny the Elder, another reoccurring historical character.

The next two hundred years after Eratosthenes' death was filled up by the spread of the Roman Empire, by the taking over by the Romans of the vast possessions previously held by Alexander and his successors and by the Carthaginians, and by their spread into Gaul, Britain, and Germany.

Much of the increased knowledge thus obtained was summed up in the geographical work of Strabo, who wrote in Greek about 20 BC.

He introduced from the extra knowledge thus obtained many modifications of the system of Eratosthenes, but on the whole kept to his general conception of the world.

He rejected, however, the existence of Thule, and thus made the world narrower, while he recognized the existence of Yerneh, or Ireland, which he regarded as the most northerly part of the habitable world, lying, as he thought, north of Britain.

Between the time of Strabo and that of Ptolemy, which sums up all the knowledge of the ancients about the habitable earth, there was only one considerable addition to man's acquaintance with their neighbors, contained in a seaman's manual for the navigation of the Indian Ocean, known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

This gave very full and tolerably accurate account of the coasts from Aden to the mouth of the Ganges, though it regarded Ceylon as much greater and more to the south than it really is.

But it also contains an account of the more easterly parts of Asia, Indochina, and China itself, quote-unquote, where the silk comes from.

While he recognized the existence of Irena, or Ireland, which he regarded as the most northerly part of the habitable world, lying, as he thought, north of Britain.

Between the time of Strabo and that of Ptolemy, who sums up all the knowledge of the ancients about the habitable earth, there was only one considerable addition to men's acquaintance with their neighbors, contained in a seaman's manual for the navigation of the Indian Ocean, known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

This gave very full and tolerably accurate accounts of the coasts from Aden to the mouth of the Ganges, though it regarded Ceylon as much greater and more to the south than it really is, but it also contains an account of the more easterly parts of Asia, Indochina, and China itself, where the silk comes from.

This had an important influence on the views of Ptolemy, as we shall see, and indirectly helped long afterwards to the discovery of America.

And then those initiates like Apuleius who would come out and kind of give us more insider details onto what was happening there.

Strabo and so forth.

They will describe what's going on in the mysteries.

And there's like all these different angles that...

There is an ancient account that Greek storytellers in Egypt told about a tale of a woman named Rhodopis.

We don't know who first told it exactly when people began telling it, but the earliest surviving written account comes from this person named Strabo.

He was a Greek geographer, and he was writing around the turn of the first century.

He reported that an eagle carried off Rhodopis' sandal and dropped it beside the king of Egypt.