Blair Collection > Critical dissertations on the origin, antiquities, language, government, manners, and religion, of the antient Caledonians, their posterity the Picts, and the British and Irish Scots

of the IVeJlern IJJands. 207
The geography, as well as internal hiflory of
the Northern Europe, was little known to the
writers of Greece and Rome. The uncultivated
and barbarous ftate of the Celtic nations difcou-
raged travellers from going among them. The
Romans met often, on their frontiers, hoftile na-
tions, to whofe very name, as well as country,
they were abfolute ftrangers. — Involved in a cloud
of barbarifm at home, the inhabitants of the Nortii
were only feen when they carried war and defola-
tion into the provinces of the empire ; and con-
fequently the accounts given of them by the hi-
ftorians of Rome are vague and uncertain.
This ignorance of the true flate of the Nor-
thern divifion of Europe afforded an ample field
for fid\ion, and encouraged pretended travellers
who had a talent for fable, to impofe upon the
world the moft abfurd tales, with regard to the
fituation, hifliory and inhabitants of the barbarous
regions beyond the pale of Roman empire. Srrabo
complains frequently that Pythias the MaH-ilian,
and other travellers, could not be credited, in the
account they gave of their voyages, v/hich looked
more like a poetical fidtion, tlian a fliithful nar-
ration of fads. Pythias, though a man in the
TC^rA indigent circumflances, had the vanity to
fay, that he had travelled over all the Northern
divifion of Europe,. to the very extremities of the
woild : " A flory, nor to be credited," faith
Srrabo*, '* though Mercury himfelf had told it,"
Hr pretended to have vifitcd Britain in the courfe
oF his p-^rpgii'^itiors, and v/itli great gravity gives
a very circumftantial defcription of that ifland.
* Lib. ii. p. 163.
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