And if there is anything that does not correspond with reality, we must set it down to change or error or poetic license, a combination of history, disposition, and myth.
Now the end aimed at by history is truth, and so we find the poet in the Catalogue of Ships mentioning the peculiar features of each place, calling one town "rocky," another "on the border," another "with many doves," another "by the sea";
and the end aimed at by disposition is vividness, as in his battle scenes, while the aim of myth is to please or astonish.
But to invent everything neither produces illusion nor is it like Homer; for all consider his poems to be philosophical works, and refuse to follow the advice of Eratosthenes who tells us not to judge the poems by their meaning or seek for history in them.
Polybius says, too, that to understand<quote><l>Nine days by cruel storms I thence was borne</l></quote>of a short voyage is more likely, as cruel winds do not carry us strange, than to understand that he sailed out into the ocean as if fair winds blew all the time.
And reckoning the distance from Cape <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Malea&groupId=730&placeId=1337">Malea</a> to the Pillars of Hercules as twenty-two thousand stades, he says if this were traversed in nine days at a uniform pace it would mean that each day he made 2500 stades.
Now, who his ever heard of anyone sailing from <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Lycia&groupId=711&placeId=1304">Lycia</a> or <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Rhodes&groupId=931&placeId=1665">Rhodes</a> to <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Alexandria&groupId=1063&placeId=1868">Alexandria</a> in two days, the distance here being 4000 stades?
And to those who object that Ulysses, though he came thrice to <a class="linkToPlace" target="_blank" href="/place?placename=Sicily&groupId=973&placeId=1724">Sicily</a>, did not once pass the Straits of Messina, he replies that every one after him also avoided this route. This, then, is what he says.
Walbank Commentary