River
Flumen Cynips
Wadi Caan
Listen to the story
Around 514 BC Dorieus, son of a Spartan king, tried to found a colony at the mouth of the Flumen Cynips, but after two years the Libyan Makai and their Carthaginian allies drove the settlers back to Sparta, halting Greek expansion in Africa. The river, now the Wadi Caan in Libya, meets the sea about eighteen kilometres south-east of Leptis Magna. Its fields were famed for their fertility, and the poet Virgil praised the goats raised there. The map draws its course unusually thin and faint, with a nameless mountain range where the geographer Ptolemy placed its sources.