... Scotland, and in the course of the almost 400 years that they dom-inated Britain, the Romans gained consider-able knowledge of that land. At the otherextreme of the empire, the Emperor Trajan(ruling ... a Greek of the first centuryB.C. from the Roman-con-trolled island of Mitilini, off the northeasterncoast of Asia Minor. He provided quite adetailed description of the Caucasus, the mountainous ... necessarily the report of the original discoverer. For that is anothercharacteristic shared by many if not most of these stories of ancient discoveries and ex-plorations: Many of the accounts of ancientdiscoveries...