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Roman explorers measured in miles (milia passuum), and Strabo (Strabo 7.7.4; fr. 56 (Jones)) reported that most people counted eight stades to the mile, although Polybius (Polyb. 34.12.4) added an extra two plethra, or one-third of a stade, making eight and one-third stades equal to one Roman mile. Walbank suggested that Polybius’s amendment was for greater accuracy over long distances and easier mathematical conversions from miles to stades (Walbank 1979, iii. 624): to convert m.p. to stades one simply multiplies the distance by 25 and divides by 3. The Sylloge Tacticorum author also comments upon conversions to miles in Strabo, mistaking Polybius’s eight and one-third stades to the mile as a proposal of eight and one-quarter by Eratosthenes, and he asserts that the mile was now conventionally reckoned as seven and one-half stades, a calculation also appearing in Aelian’s Tactica (Kidd 1988: 730). Censorinus (de die nat. 13.2), who wrote in the first half of the third century CE, went so far as to call the stade that was one-eighth of a mile (625 Roman feet) the “Italic stade” (Morgan 1973: 30). Roman authors generally used stades when handling material taken from the Greek geographers or when dealing with nautical distances, and except for a few exceptional uses of the stade, they employed miles for all land measurements taken by Roman surveyors (Morgan 1973: 34–35; Arnaud 1993: 242).