Adria (Hastings' Dictionary)

The sea ';amidst ' which the ship carrying St. Paul wa? driven during fourteen days, before it stranded on Mclita.

After passing Crete, the voyagers en- countered a violent 'north-easter' (KV Eura- quilo), before which they drifted, and running under the island of Clauda (RV Cauda, now Gozo), they were afraid of being carried towards the quicksands (RV Sijrtis) dreaded by the mariner on the African coast ; but eventually, on the four- teenth day, descried land, where they ran the ship aground on an island called Melita. The sea whici) they traversed is termed 6 'ASpias.

Three questions arise — (I) as to the form, (2) as to the origin, and (3) as to the range or connotation, of the word. 1. WII prefer the aspirated form "ASpias ; but while both forms occur in ancient writers (see the variations in Pauly-Wiss. HE s.v.), our choice must depend on the probable derivation of the name. 2.

There were two towns of similar name^Atria or Hadria, in Picenum (now Atri), an inland town having no relation to the Adriatic (except indirectly through its port of Matrinum), and Atria, a town of early commercial importance near the mouth of the Po, with which the name is associated by suth authorities'as Livy (v. 33), Strabo (v. 1), and Pliny (UN iii. 120). This town, still called Adria, is described by Livy and others as a Tuscan settle- ment, but by Justin (xx. 1. 9)a8of Gr.

origin; and its early relations with Greece are (as Mommsen, in CIL v. 1. p. 220, pointsout)yet more certainly attested by painted vases of Gr. style found in no small num- ber there, but not elsewhere in that district of Italy. The Picentino town was in imperial times called Hadria, and earlier coins belcmging to it are inscribed HAT.

, while in inscriptions from the town on the Po the first letter is represented by A, not by II, and Mommsen, for that reason, has latterly preferred the form Atria. 3. As Adrias was early used in the sense, to which Adriatic has again been confined, of the branch of the sea between Italy and lllyria, it was not unnatural so to understand it in Ac 27, csp. as an island off its Illyrian shore, Melita (now Meleda), might have been the scene of the ship- wreck. Hryant (I)iss.

on the wind Euroclydon), Macknight, and others adopted this view, which some, on their authority, have accepted, although Scaliger had pronounced it ridiculous and harclly worth refuting. Its chief champion is \V, Falconer, li ADKIEL ADVENTUKE whose Dissertf.tion on St. Paul's Voynje, published in IS'.T, was reissued in 1870 by tlie writer's nephew, Judge Falconer, with copious adilitional notes controverting (though with little real success) the arguments of Mr.

Smith of Jordanhill, in support of the tradition which regards Malta as tlie scene of shipwTeck, and takes Adrias in the wider sense of the waters between Crete and Sicily (Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul, 1818). The liistory of the strangely varying usage is well indicated by Partsch in Pauly-Wiss. s.v., and by Midler in his ed. of Strabo, pp. 328, 335, 338.

At first the name strictly belonged to the inner portion adjoining the mouths of the Po and the coast of the Veneti, while the lower or south portion was known as the Ionian Sea. But these names soon became interchangeable, or, if a distinction was drawn, it was that of two basins — the inner as far as Mount Garganus being more strictly 'the Adrias,' the outer the Ionian Sea. Strabo expressly recognises this distinction, but indicates that Adrias had now become the name for the whole (ii.

123, vii. 187). But while Adrias comes thus to include the Ionian Sea, the latter term in its turn obtained an extension to the sea lying between the west coasts of Greece and Sicily, « hich is called by Strabo the Sicilian, and was also termed the Ausonian Sea (ii. 123), and the name Adrias now received a corresponding, but even greater, exten- sion.

A very clear light is thrown on the range or connotation of ' the Adrias,' as used in Acts, by the statements of Ptolemy, who flourished (not ' immediately,' as Smith has said (p. 127), but) sixty or seventy years after St. Luke (he was alive 160 A.D. ), and who presents an usage which must be presumed to have been not only existent, but current and generally accepted for some consider- able lime, in order to find a place in such a work. Ptolemy places the Adriatic to the east of Sicily (iii.

4), to the south of Achaia (iii. 14), to the west and south of the Peloponnesus (iii. 16), and to the west of Crete (iii. 15), thus giving to it precisely the extent which Strabo assigns to the Sicilian Sea. We meet the same wider range in earlier as well as later writers. The only argument of weight adduced by Judge Falconer in opposition to the case thus established, is that elsewhere (iv. 3) Ptolemy places Melita (Malta) in the African Sea, which bounds Sicily on the south.

But it is too much to construe this as though Ptolemy 'dis- tinctly and unequivocally excluded the island from all seas but that of Africa.' The alleged ' exclusion ' is a mere inference by Falconer from the ' inclusion'; not at all necessary where Melita, lying between the two seas called African and Sicilian, might easily be associated with either. At any rate, the main question concerns not the mere geographical a.

ssignation of Melita as such, but the meaning to be attached to ' the Adrias ' as the sea which the vessel traversed on its voyage. And here most commentators agree in holding that, in accordance with the current usage of the time when St. Luke wrote, the word is applied to the whole expanse of waters between Crete and Sicily. William P. Dickson.