Ancient Geography

The Discovery of the World in Classical Greece and Rome

Duane W. Roller

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857739230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

The last dedicated book on ancient geography was published more than sixty years ago. Since then new texts have appeared (such as the Artemidoros palimpsest), and new editions of existing texts (by geographical authorities who include Agatharchides, Eratosthenes, Pseudo-Skylax and Strabo) have been produced. There has been much archaeological research, especially at the perimeters of the Greek world, and a more accurate understanding of ancient geography and geographers has emerged. The topic is therefore overdue a fresh and sustained treatment. In offering precisely that, Duane Roller explores important topics like knowledge of the world in the Bronze Age and Archaic periods; Greek expansion into the Black Sea and the West; the Pythagorean concept of the earth as a globe; the invention of geography as a discipline by Eratosthenes; Polybios the explorer; Strabo's famous Geographica; the travels of Alexander the Great; Roman geography; Ptolemy and late antiquity; and the cultural reawakening of antique geographical knowledge in the Renaissance, including Columbus' use of ancient sources.

CHAPTER 1

THE BEGINNINGS

The Mediterranean—which surrounds the Greek heartland—is well suited for seafaring and exploration. Rarely is one out of sight of land. Its largest expanse is southeast of Italy and Sicily, where a sail from Syracuse to Kyrene might briefly be as much as 200 miles from shore, but a deviation to the east would keep land in sight.¹ Rugged coastlines can be seen far away: Mt Etna on Sicily is visible 100 miles out to sea. All the islands in the Mediterranean can be seen from some other point of land, so every locality could be explored without being in the open sea, and in many places one could cross the Mediterranean and always be in view of land.

Seamanship in the Greek world began in the Middle Neolithic Period. At Sesklo in northeastern Thessaly (not far from where Jason and the Argonauts were to set sail), obsidian from the island of Melos has been found in contexts from as early as the fifth millenium BC,² and it is hard to imagine that this obsidian made its journey by any means other than ship, although contemporary ships may have been little more than primitive rafts, much like the one Odysseus used to escape the affections of Kalypso, and whose construction Homer described in detail.³ The journey from Melos to Sesklo need not have been entirely by sea: one could go from one western Cycladic island to another and reach the coast of Attika, and then continue overland, but some degree of sea passage was required. The adventurous person who first brought Melian obsidian to the mainland unwittingly inaugurated the era of Mediterranean exploration and thus began the path to the discipline of geography. By the latter third millenium BC ships were represented in art: on a terracotta “frying pan” of c.2500–2100 BC, probably from the island of Syros (not far from Melos), is an incised drawing of a low, long vessel with a high stern and 16 oars on each side, the earliest view of a ship from the Mediterranean world.⁴ Somewhat later, at the opening of the Middle Bronze Age, seafaring in the Aegean was well advanced.

To be sure, the Aegean peoples came late to the exploration of the Mediterranean. Egyptians had long sailed from the Nile Delta to the Levant, and knew about Crete and southwestern Anatolia. Assyrians may have ventured west into the Mediterranean.⁵ The Greeks themselves knew some details about the Minoans on Crete, who covered much of the eastern Mediterranean and perhaps went as far as Italy, as several toponyms such as “Minoa” suggest, although it is also possible that these names may be from a later period and a supposed history of a Cretan presence.⁶ The Minoan thalassocracy, so much a part of the lore of the early Aegean, and the tale of the death of King Minos in Sicily, are not documented before the fifth century BC, but this may be due to the nature of the surviving evidence, and there was an ancient “Tomb of Minos,” an impressive multi-story structure, in southern Sicily many generations previous to this time.⁷ These voyages—Egyptian, Cretan, and Assyrian—mean that before the Trojan War the sailing routes across the eastern Mediterranean had been well established. Travels for commercial, political, and military reasons created a database of topographical knowledge that could be used for geographical purposes.

The Argonauts

The first great voyage of the Greek world was that of Jason and the Argonauts, who sailed in the Argo to far-off Colchis, in search of the Golden Fleece. The myth is placed in the generation before the Trojan War (thus somewhat after 1300 BC), since the brothers Peleus and Telamon, the fathers of Achilles and Aias, participated, although the list of Argonauts is extremely long and such genealogical associations are always dubious. Understanding the story of the Argonauts is difficult because of the minimal early source material: the most familiar version, the Argonautika of Apollonios of Rhodes, is from the third century BC and reflects contemporary geographical knowledge unlikely to have been in the original account.⁸ Yet the tale is early and may contain elements from the very beginnings of seamanship. The unusual properties of the Argo—it could speak because it had wood from the sacred oak at the oracle of Dodona built into it—go back to an early era when seamanship and navigation still seemed to be a matter of magic rather than skill.⁹

Deconstructing the Argonaut story is problematic. One would think that it would have been a favorite topic of discussion at Troy, given that sons of the adventurers were present and prominent, but the tale is not mentioned in the Iliad, and Jason is named merely because his son Euneos, a minor character in the epic, brought wine from Lemnos for the Achaians.¹⁰ It is only in the Odyssey that there is any hint of the expedition, in the sailing instructions given to Odysseus by Kirke. She tells him that only one ship has passed through the Clashing Rocks (Planktai): the Argo, with Jason aboard.¹¹ Kirke was the sister of Aietes, the father of Medea, and although she never speaks of the relationship between her niece and Jason, the story has elements of a family tale. The Planktai, also called the Wandering Rocks, were normally located at the entrance to the Black Sea,¹² yet it is by no means certain that Homer had placed them there. Thus Homer's knowledge of Jason and the Argonauts was of a great expedition that overcame at least one major peril and which may have entered the Black Sea and perhaps was associated with Aietes. Homer did not specify where Aietes lived, or reveal any obvious knowledge of the Black Sea. Hesiod, somewhat later, had more detail, including the first citation of the Phasis River (modern Rioni, at the southeast corner of the Black Sea), the river that flows through Colchis. He was also the first to give the name of Aietes’ daughter, Medea, whom Jason took back home to Iolkos.¹³ The connection between the Argonauts and Colchis is also documented by the Corinthian poet Eumelos, a rough contemporary of Hesiod.¹⁴ In his version, Aietes, a local ruler in the Corinthia, went to Colchis and established himself there; for this reason Jason eventually ended up in Corinth with Medea, events that led to the dismal conclusion recounted in Euripides’ Medea. Thus the entire Argonaut tale and its wide-ranging settings were in place by the eighth century BC—except perhaps the actual reason for the expedition—although details continued to be refined into Hellenistic times.

The story follows a series of familiar mythological formulae: the deposed heir to the throne who inconviently returns to claim his inheritance, the sending of him on a expedition which he is not expected to survive, the liaison with a foreign princess, and the unexpected return home. In mythology, it is yet another account of the dysfunctional aristocratic family of the Greek Bronze Age. But one of its most familiar elements is not mentioned in these early versions, and may come from a totally different source. The Golden Fleece was known to Hesiod only in the context of another early tale of exploration: that of Phrixos and Helle.¹⁵ When the two stories were joined is not certain, but eventually the goal of the Argonauts was the fleece itself, one of the more interesting items of Greek mythology. Despite the magical origins, it represents two essential elements of wealth in early Greek society: sheep and gold. It remained a powerful token: as late as the first century AD the grove in Colchis where it hung was still visible.¹⁶ There were many ways to rationalize the story—perhaps the most interesting is that fleeces were used to wash gold in the Caucasus, a practice still followed in the first century BC—but it is perhaps nothing more than a striking metaphor for Greek attempts to capitalize on the wealth at the far end of the Black Sea.¹⁷ The Greeks were beginning to explore that sea at the time of Hesiod and Eumelos, their first attempt to move beyond the Mediterranean proper into other waters. It was a dangerous area that was called Somber or Black, guarded by the infamous Wandering or Clashing Rocks. The sea was not named in extant literature until the fifth century BC,¹⁸ but Hesiod nonetheless knew two of the rivers that emptied into it, the Istros (modern Danube) and the Phasis (modern Rioni), the latter at the farthest point of the sea in the region called Colchis. To go from the Aegean to the mouth of the Phasis would exactly replicate the voyage of the Argo, and it seems probable that by the time of Eumelos and Hesiod this was done on a regular basis—a journey of more than 1,000 miles from Iolkos, where the Argo started. Eventually there was a homonymous Milesian settlement at the outlet of the Phasis, probably established in the fifth century BC.¹⁹ But Hesiod knew of the river long before Greeks settled at its mouth, and the Argonautic expedition came to be explained as a search for precious metals²⁰—simplistic but perhaps the original reason for curiosity about the farther areas of the Black Sea, an interest perhaps going back to the Bronze Age. Gold mining had long existed in this region, not so much around the Black Sea coast but in areas of the Caucasus reached from the upper Phasis, especially the district known in antiquity as Iberia. Moreover the river was the western end of a trade route that, while difficult, extended far into the interior.²¹

The voyage of the Argo is a mythological remnant of the first long trading voyages made by Greeks. The tale that is familiar today evolved over many centuries and from several different sources, intermingling Thessalian, Corinthian, and Italian elements. Some of it is exceedingly old, perhaps pre-Greek, and other parts are as recent as the emergent Greek knowledge of the Black Sea in the Archaic period. Perhaps the data provided by the early expedition of the Argonauts stimulated Greek exploration of the southeastern Black Sea in later times, and by the eighth century BC some adventurous Greeks, knowing about the Argonauts, decided to see if the wealth of Colchis really existed. Greeks were at the mouth of the Phasis before 700 BC, although no permanent settlement was established at that time.²² These traders and merchants were not geographers, but they brought back toponyms and sailing directions, and a sense of a world beyond the Mediterranean.

The Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad

In the second book of the Iliad is a well-known list of the Achaian forces who marshalled at Troy, followed by a shorter one of the Trojans.²³ It has long been recognized that these catalogues are, in many ways, independent of the narrative of the Iliad—there is remarkably little correspondence, especially in the Trojan catalogue, between those listed and the action of the poem—and they probably represent a different, later, and more geographical tradition than the bulk of the Iliad. Some of the places mentioned do not seem to have been occupied until long after the Trojan War era.²⁴ Regardless of its origin, the Achaian catalogue is the earliest geographical document in Greek literature, with 175 toponyms cited.²⁵ It was probably Central Greek in origin, since the Boiotians are presented first and located in 30 places, but have little role in the action of the epic: in fact, more than a quarter of the names are from Boiotia and adjoining areas. The catalogue is like a map, and is selective in ways that will never be understood. The presentation of topographical and ethnographic details—often as little as a single word or less than a line of poetry—established the pattern of topographical description in Greek geographical writers, who regularly deconstructed the catalogue in detail. In the Hellenistic period, entire treatises were devoted to this, most notably that of Apollodoros of Athens, who in the second century BC wrote 12 books on the catalogue, and his contemporary Demetrios of Skepsis, who produced 30 books on the Trojan one. Neither of these works is extant, but Strabo made extensive use of both and added many comments of his own.

The Return of the Heroes From Troy

Somewhat easier to interpret in the context of developing geographical knowledge is the cultural event known to the Greeks as the Nostoi or the Returns. This refers to the homecoming of the Achaians who had survived the Trojan War, representing a transition to the post-war era in the early twelfth century BC. Those who had no difficulty and ended their lives back home, such as Nestor and even Agamemnon, are of no interest geographically, but many others had wide-ranging wanderings into regions previously unknown. Like much of the material associated with the war itself, details evolved and were enhanced over time, especially as geographical knowledge expanded, with the story of Aineias, or Aeneas, perhaps the most obvious example. Moreover, there is always the impossible task of accurately separating the various layers of material: the event itself, which may have occ...