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COMMENTARY
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Erineos, which was in Doris in central Greece, but evidence for connecting it with the promontory called Erineas is lacking. Though the text does not actually say so, it seems probable that, like Tetras, this was a place in Sicily. The similarity of the stone found at Erineas to those at Bina, the odor on burning, and the appearance of the residue after combustion, all tend to show that it was a bituminous product such as rock asphalt. The occurrence of great quantities of this material in Sicily lends considerable support to this identification. The deposit at Ragusa, for example, which forms a bed 10 to 50 feet thick and 1,600 to 2,000 feet long, is one of the largest in Europe, and, in spite of the fact that it has been worked for a long time, recently over 100,000 tons of rock asphalt have been obtained from it annually. Smaller deposits of commercial importance occur at Modica and Scicli in the same region. The rock asphalt in these localities is a soft fossiliferous limestone containing from 2 to 30 per cent of actual asphalt.74 If one assumes that Erineas was in Sicily, the combustible stone found there could not have been some non-asphaltic pyrobitumen such as coal or lignite, for these do not occur on the island."
15. the stone found at Binai.
The reading τφ iv Βίναις is the emendation of Turnebus. The manuscripts have ταΐ? κίναις, but this makes no sense. Binai has already been mentioned in section 12.
16. Among the substances that are dug up because they are useful, those \nown simply as coals are made of earth, and they are set on fire and burnt like charcoal. Here Theophrastus mentions Liguria, a coastal district in northwestern Italy, and Elis, the district in Greece in the northwestern part of the Peloponnesus, where Olympia is situated. Some commentators on this interesting passage have concluded that Theophrastus is referring to anthracite or to bituminous coal. Certain considerations, however, make it very improbable that this conclusion is justified. One is that true coal does not occur in Greece,
74 H. Abraham, Asphalts and Allied Substances (New York, 1945), Vol. I, pp. 22934·
75 W. Mclnnes, D.B. Dowling, and W.W. Leach, The Coal Resources of the World (Toronto, 1913), Vol. II, pp. 721-33.
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