The Periplus pinpoints the ancient settlements of the Meroe people in a city in their name, when it says, ‘On the right-hand coast next below Berenice is the country of the Berbers, the Fish-Eaters. Beyond them are the Wild Fish Eaters and the Calf Eaters. Behind them, and further inland, in the country toward the west, there lies a city called Meroe’.
In Vergil’s Ecologue(IX), Moeris identifies the city Meroe of the Periplus which it puts along with the land of the Calf Eaters and the Fish Eaters.
Here Lycidas sings on the land of Moeris:
‘But surely I had heard
That where the hills first draw from off the plain,
That where high ridge with gentle slope descends
Down the brook side and the broken crests
Of yonder veteran beeches, all the land
Was by the songs of your Menalcas saved…’
What Lycidas said on the ancient land of the Moeris, his friend agreed; but the situation has changed by the ‘clash of arms’: now Moeris sings on their land:
‘heard it you had, and so the rumours ran,
But ‘mid the clash of arms, may Lycidas,
Our songs avail no more than, as ‘tis said,
Doves of Dodan when an eagle comes,
Nay, had I not, from hollow ilex-bole
Warned by a raven on the left, cut short
The rising feud, nor I, your Moeris here,
No, nor Menalcas, were alive today…’
Vergil gives a clean geographical picture of the ancient land of the Moeris tribe; even his friend Lycidas who represents the ‘das’ of the Lichhavis people who were identified as worshippers of the Lakuchi tree (Lote of the Bible); he paints the beauty of his land in his songs. Thus he sings, ‘….the Muses made me too a singer; I too have sung, the swains call me a poet, but I believe them not: For naught of mine, or worthy Varius yet, or Cinna deem I…’