6. Inde nationibus Indicis certatim cum donis optimates
mittentibus . . . ab usque Divis et Serendivis. Ammian.
xxii. 7. This island, to which the names of Taprobana,
Serendib, and Ceylon, have been successively applied,
manifests how imperfectly the seas and lands to the east of
Cape Comorin were known to the Romans. 1. Under the reign of
Claudius, a freedman, who farmed the customs of the Red Sea,
was accidentally driven by the winds upon this strange and
undiscovered coast: he conversed six months with the
natives: and the king of Ceylon, who heard for the first
time of the power and justice of Rome, was persuaded to send
an embassy to the emperor (Plin. Hist. Nat. vi. 24). 2. The
geographers (and even Ptolemy) have magnified above fifteen
times the real size of this new world, which they extended
as far as the equator, and the neighbourhood of China.