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Herodotus (2.6, 5.53) describes the Persian parasang measure as 30 stades and the Egyptian schoinos as 60; by his account the Sardis to Susa route was 450 parasangs. Xenophon (Anab. 2.2.6, 5.5.4, 7.8.26) also gives 30 stades for the parasang, although the passages in the Anabasis with his journey calculations hint at the parasang as either a variable unit of measure or one employed more for narratological impact than mathematical accuracy (Rood 2010). Strabo (11.11.5) puts the parasang at 40 stades, noting that it varied between 30 and 60 stades according to different authorities, and he gives the same length and variations for the schoinos. Strabo credits Artemidorus (not Herodotus) with the schoinos equivalency of 30 stades, based on his distance from Alexandria to the vertex of the Nile delta (28 schoinoi, or 840 stades), although he notes that he himself saw measures of 40 stades and more used for schoinoi on the Nile, where a schoinos denoted the interval between each of the cities, which were not equidistant (17.1.24, 11.11.5). The anonymous late ninth-century Byzantine Sylloge Tacticorum, preserved in a single codex (Laur. 75.6), contains a short passage on distance units. It states that the Persian parasang had a variable measure, from Xenophon’s 30 stades to 60 for others, as reported by Strabo in a quote from Posidonius (Edelstein and Kidd 1989, F203). It is suggested that this author, instead of directly consulting Strabo, took this material from other secondary sources on either Strabo or Posidonius’s scientific writings (Kidd 1988: 729–730).

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