Island
Insula Melita
Mljet
Listen to the story
Mljet, an island off the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, is the Insula Melita of the Tabula, a name found in exactly this form nowhere else. The island was probably settled by Greeks, and the poet Callimachus, quoted by the Roman writer Pliny, knew it for the dogs bred there. Between 35 and 33 BC, the future emperor Augustus conquered it in his Illyrian war, on a charge of piracy, and emptied it of its people. Yet the Greek geographer Agathemeros still counted it among the four most important islands of the Adriatic, and the map still records it.