CHAPTER 3

THE SPREAD OF GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE AND SCHOLARSHIP IN THE CLASSICAL PERIOD

The Carthaginians

It is not known for certain when Carthage became independent from Phoenician control—perhaps as early as the eighth century BC. When this occurred, the Carthaginians acquired the Phoenician possessions in the western Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coast. They also embarked on their own program of exploration, seeking trading and mercantile opportunities. Around 500 BC, Himilko and Hanno, two members of the ruling Magonid family, were sent to explore the region beyond the Pillars of Herakles. A summary report of Hanno's journey survives in a Greek translation probably of the fifth century BC, the earliest extant periplous.¹ In Greek sources, Hanno was first cited by name in the Aristotelian On Marvellous Things Heard, although Herodotos probably knew about him. Despite intense modern criticism, there is no reason to doubt that the voyage actually took place.²

The text that exists today is a summary—whether the work of Hanno or the Greek translator is unclear—with several gaps and a sudden conclusion that gives the impression that the translator lost interest. The account has been partially Hellenized, with some toponyms translated into Greek descriptive terms, and using “Aithiopian” for one of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, a purely Greek view of the demographics of this region. The text opens with a statement of purpose, which suggests a major colonizing expedition:

It was decreed by the Carthaginians that Hanno sail beyond the Pillars of Herakles and establish Libyphoenician cities. Thus he sailed in command of 60 fifty-oared ships and with a great number of men and women, in the amount of 30,000, along with grain and other supplies.³

Any account of the journey from Carthage to the Pillars has not been preserved, and the more detailed narrative begins when they reached Thymiaterion, two days beyond the Pillars. They continued to Soloeis, probably around Cape Spartel, the northwest point of Africa, and headed along the Atlantic coast, establishing settlements (perhaps small trading posts) as they went. Eventually they reached the Lixos River, where they stayed for a while, possibly making a reconnaissance into the interior, and taking interpreters on board, which would suggest that the Carthaginians had already been this far. The town of Lixos at the mouth of the river (modern Leukos in Morocco, which preserves the name) is the one place that Hanno visited that continued to be important into Greek and Roman times, although there are insoluble difficulties in coordinating Hanno's toponym with the historical site. Farther down the coast they also had an extended layover at a place they named Kerne, which remained an Carthaginian outpost for some time, but which cannot be located today.⁴

After Kerne the character of the account changes. There is no further indication of establishing settlements or extended stops, and one has the impression that only Hanno and a few companions went farther. The land became remote and mysterious, with increasingly hostile locals and little help from the interpreters:

we landed, seeing nothing in the daytime but woods, yet at night many fires were burning, and we heard the sound of flutes, cymbals, and the beating of drums, and an infinite amount of shouting. We were taken with fear, and the seers ordered us to leave the island. We quickly sailed away and passed by a land that was full of burning incense, from which fiery streams flowed down to the ocean.⁵

Strange flora and fauna were encountered, including crocodiles and hippopotami. Volcanic phenomena were also prevalent. The expedition turned east at the Horn of the West, probably the Île de Gorée in Senegal, and eventually reached the Chariot of the Gods, a huge mountain that put forth fire. There is little doubt that this is Mt Cameroon, the only active volcano on the coast. Three days later, about a month from Carthage, they reached the Horn of the South, probably modern Cape Lopez in Gabon, the westernmost point on the southern African coast. Here they encountered a wild and hostile people called the Gorillai, a local ethnym that in the nineteenth century was misapplied to the species of ape. Then, suddenly, the expedition turned back, although there may be a gap in the extant text at this point. They were far from home (at about the equator), low on supplies, and facing hostile locals. Moreover, their interpreters were increasingly unreliable, and they were in a volcanically active region.

No previous expedition had provided such precise data about lands so far from the Mediterranean. Its motives are unclear: an initial extravagant voyage of settlement seems to have evolved into one of exploration. Hanno may have been commissioned to encircle the continent, but was unable to do so.⁶ A search for metals may have also been part of the project.⁷ Greeks probably knew about the expedition within a generation or two, and the account of Hanno remains the most detailed report about the west African coast before the Portuguese explorations of the fifteenth century. There were other Carthaginian expeditions, but they are much more poorly known, and none has the benefit of an early Greek translation of its report.

About the same time that Hanno went south, Himilko went north, although his voyage is not documented before Roman times.⁸ Himilko went beyond the extremity of Europe, and three references to him in the Ora maritima of Avienus, gathered from ancient Carthaginian sources, are all that is known about his cruise.⁹ Substantive details are thus few, but imply activity in coastal northwest Europe and that he may have been the first from the Mediterranean to visit Ireland.¹⁰ Himilko spent four months on his expedition (in contrast to Hanno's single month), which allows for a wide-ranging journey, as far as Ireland and perhaps even to the Azores, but this all remains speculative.¹¹

A third Carthaginian, Mago, may have attempted to establish the routes across the Sahara. He claimed to have crossed the desert three times without water, which, if not outright exaggeration, demonstrates an astute knowledge of the journey from oasis to oasis.¹² Whether this is the same Mago who appeared at the court of Gelon of Syracuse (reigned c.491–478 BC) and claimed that he had circumnavigated Africa cannot be proven:¹³ here “Mago” (or “Magos”) may not be a proper name but a Persian magus. This is remindful of the contemporary Persian expedition led by Sataspes, who was ordered by Xerxes to make the circumnavigation of the continent.¹⁴ The journey was not completed, with the result that he was executed by the king, but it is rare evidence of Persian activity in the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic. Two points about Sataspes’ cruise are of interest: like Kambyses a generation earlier, he encountered “small men,” possibly pygmies, and the reason that he failed was because his ship became stuck, perhaps caught in oceanic vegetation or a strong ebb tide—phenomena little known at this time—or even a river outflow. He may have been among the first to document the oceanic tides.

For a long time, Greek knowledge of these expeditions was minimal. Those of Himilko and Mago seem hardly to have been remembered, and even the Greek translation of Hanno's report was probably only a small part of the original. The Carthaginians discouraged any expeditions other than their own into these regions: in fact it was said that they would drown anyone who approached the Pillars, and as early as the beginning of the Roman Republic a treaty between Rome and Carthage excluded the shipping of the former from areas claimed by the latter.¹⁵ A Greek who seems to have made it to Kerne in the mid-fourth century BC was told that no one could sail any farther south due to local conditions, perhaps a deliberate Carthaginian attempt to dissuade any Greek investigations in the region.¹⁶ The unknown author was able to report on trading conditions at Kerne, yet, other than the Greek summary of Hanno's report, there was little Greek awareness of Carthaginian activity in the Atlantic until Carthage was conquered by the Romans in 146 BC. At that time its libraries were saved and works were translated into Greek or Latin, thus revealing the true extent of Carthaginian exploration. The historian and explorer Polybios, who was present at the fall of Carthage, seems to have been the one to implement this process.¹⁷

Geography in Greek Literature of the Early Fifth Century BC

As geographical knowledge expanded, it began to work its way into the writings of authors whose main interest was neither geographical nor historical. Pindar, who was active in the first half of the fifth century BC, is remembered today for his collection of songs commemorating the victors at the four great athletic festivals of Olympia, Delphi, Nemea, and Isthmia. He was Boiotian in origin but received commissions from throughout the Greek world, from Thrace to Kyrene and Sicily.¹⁸ How much he visited the places that he wrote about remains uncertain—it is always a problem to determine whether an author used autopsy or not¹⁹—but his writings, as well as those of his contemporary Aeschylus, demonstrate a more extensive geographical knowledge than any previous Greek authors who were not writers specifically on the topic. His utility to geography is shown by the fact that Strabo cited him nearly 30 times, often from poems that have not survived.

Pindar's geographical notices are expressed in terms of mythology. He mentioned the Pillars of Herakles several times as a metaphor for extreme achievement: Theron of Akragas, who won the chariot race at Olympia in 476 BC, “grasped the Pillars of Herakles.” Aristokleides of Aigina, winner of the pankration at Nemea, went “beyond the Pillars of Herakles, farther into the inaccessible sea.”²⁰ Several times Pindar referred to the Hyperboreans, those “Beyond the North,” a term that first appears in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysos, as one of the remote peoples that the god reached,²¹ and who had been the goal of Aristeas in his journey north of the Black Sea.²² The word “Hyperborean” is not an indigenous name but a Greek descriptive adjective turned into an ethnym (never a toponym), perhaps representing a faint undefined understanding that there were far northern or eastern peoples, something that Homer may have loosely comprehended.²³ To Pindar, the Hyperboreans were another metaphor for great athletic achievement as well as remote peoples among whom the fame of the successful athlete would be heard, as far distant as the source of the Nile. It was only with Herodotos that there was any scholarly attempt to analyze them.²⁴ Yet, in his citations of the Hyperboreans, Pindar demonstrated that the terminology and concepts of geography were entering common literary diction.

Pindar's brief account of the return of the Argo connects the voyage with the foundation of Kyrene, in a poem for the local citizen Arkesilas, who won the chariot race at Delphi in 472 BC.²⁵ Pindar had the Argonauts come to the Oracle of Ammon in the western desert of Egypt, as well as to Thera, the mother city of Kyrene, the earliest known example of manipulating geographical data for political purposes, something that the Argonaut tale was particularly susceptible to. The account is probably based on sources at Delphi or Kyrene.

The tragedian Aeschylus, whose seven extant tragedies are the earliest survivals of the genre, was more astute geographically than Pindar. Klytaimnestra's speech early in the Agamemnon, recounting a series of signal fires from Troy to Argos, is solidly geographical, and probably a record of early long-distance communication.²⁶ The route is perfectly reasonable, extending from the heights of Mt Ida near Troy to the peaks of Lemnos, Athos, the watchtower of Makistos in Thessaly, across the Euripos to Mt Messapion in northeastern Boiotia, Kithairon, Aigiplanktos in the Megarid, and finally arriving at Arachnaios, the mountain east of the Argolid. Unlike Pindar's use of metaphorical remote toponyms and ethnyms, this is a plausible list of the highest summits between Troy and Argos. Moreover, the itinerary in the Persians that describes the return of the Persian fleet is similar, perhaps based on what was common knowledge in post-war Athens, as is the account of the conquests of Dareios.²⁷

In the Prometheus Bound, a speech by Prometheus presents a remarkable outline of what was known geographically about the northern and eastern portions of the inhabited world.²⁸ Prometheus describes to Io how she will wander from the Caucasus to Egypt. It is jumbled geographically, but over a dozen toponyms and ethnyms are preserved. There are certain correspondences with the Circuit of the Earth of Hekataios of Miletos, such as the Chalybians, who lived in Anatolia, but with details not found in earlier sources, including their expertise at iron working.²⁹ Some of the toponyms are otherwise unknown, such as the Hybristes River—if a toponym and not merely a descriptive term—but they may have come from lost parts of Hekataios’ work. Aeschylus knew of the two continents of Asia and Europe, but had the common contemporary uncertainty regarding their division. As one would expect in a drama, the narrative is a mixture of contemporary geographical knowledge and the mythic heritage, but is demonstrative of how the new geographical data had begun to penetrate beyond the specialist literature.

Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound is known from only a few fragments, but these reveal that it also had geographical details. Four are from the two geographical authors Strabo and Arrian.³⁰ In this play Aeschylus divided Europe and Asia at the Phasis River, the point of view that was falling out of favor in his day. The most interesting fragment concerns the Stony Plain of Liguria (modern Plaine de la Crau in the Rhone delta), where rocks seemed to move spontaneously, one of several places in the world where this happens, something that is generally attributed to wind and water action.³¹ Aeschylus’ interest was mythic, not scientific—Herakles was said to have been there—yet the citation is a rare western locale for the tragedian, and shows that his geographical knowledge extended from the Caucasus to the Keltic world. Most importantly, Aeschylus was the first popularizer of geographical data. Previous descriptions, such as those by Skylax or Hekataios, were scholarly treatises, but the plays of Aeschylus were intended for the general public, and the demographic cross-section that attended the Athenian dramatic festivals could now learn about the far Caucasus or the route to Troy.

Someone who did have a scientific interest in the earth was Xanthos of Lydia, who lived during the reign of Artaxerxes I of Persia (465–424 BC). In a passage preserved by Strabo, which was transmitted from Xanthos through Eratosthenes, he reported on the effects of a drought that he had seen (location not specified), as well as seashells far from the sea, which he observed in Armenia, Matiene (in the modern Turkish–Iranian border zone), and Lower Phrygia.³² This is a broad sweep of territory—all the way from central Anatolia to what is now northwestern Iran—that he called a “plain,” an odd term for these rugged uplands, but which may indicate that he had made several different observations at separated locations. There was also a salt lagoon somewhere—perhaps more than one—all of which suggested to Xanthos that the region had once been a sea. He was not the first to examine the question of how land was formed—Xenophanes of Kolophon had done the same a century earlier³³—but Xanthos seems to have considered the issue more globally. He also believed that the contemporary drought provided a parallel for the drying up of the primeval sea he had postulated. An interest in drought may have come from Empedokles of Akragas, whose biography he wrote and who may have been one of his teachers.³⁴ Xanthos, like Empedokles, was also interested in tectonic matters. In the Katakekaumene (“Burned Up Territory”), east of Lydia, he observed the strange changes that took place in that region of contemporary vulcanism.³⁵ Unlike the matter of the seashells, no scientific explanation is preserved. Nevertheless both Eratosthenes and Strabo valued Xanthos’ scientific ability at investigating issues regarding the formation of the earth, a tangential part of geography.

Herodotos

Much of the topographical and geographical data of the previous centuries culminated in the Historiai (Researches, or Histories) of Herodotos of Halikarnassos, composed in the second half of the fifth century BC, the first extended prose work in Greek. Herodotos was not a geographer but nevertheless he had a deep interest in many topics that border on geography, including geology, topography, and ethnography. He was born in the early fifth century BC, at the time of the Persian Wars. He lived in Halikarnassos, Samos, and Athens, and was involved in the foundation of the Athenian settlement at Thourioi in southern Italy (444 BC), where he spent the rest of his life. The latest comments in the Histories are from the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in the 420s BC, and presumably he died shortly thereafter.³⁶ He was thus well placed to learn about eastern Greece, Athens, and southern Italy, and his work reveals this, but he traveled far beyond these regions. At a minimum, he visited the north shore of the Black Sea and the Skythian hinterland, the Levant and probably as far inland as Mesopotamia, and had an extended stay in Egypt, going as far as the First Cataract of the Nile.³⁷ The reason for such extensive travels—estimated as covering nearly three million square miles³⁸—remains obscure, but by his own account some of them were for reasons of pure research, and he was perhaps the first Greek to make such journeys.³⁹

Herodotos’ main theme was the conflict between the Greeks and barbarians, a term loosely applied but centered on the Persians, with a basic chronological extent from the rise of Lydia in the early seventh century BC to the final Greek defeat of Persia in 479 BC. His purpose is stated at the beginning of his work:

The researches of Herodotos of Halikarnassos are set forth here, so that what happened will not fade away from men because of time, and so that the great and marvellous deeds—both those of the Hellenes and of the barbarians—will not lack renown, especially the reason that they made war against each other.⁴⁰

These opening words—which recall the beginning of Hekataios’ Genealogiai—allow a wide range of topics, a device that Herodotos used as thoroughly as possible. He was also aware of Hekataios’ Circuit of the Earth and seems to have had it in mind more than once, and cited Homer, Skylax, Pindar, and Aeschylus.⁴¹ Most of his sources, however, were oral or autoptic, sometimes based on public inscriptions.⁴² The importance of Herodotos to geographical knowledge cannot be overestimated, as he brought together all that had been learned about the inhabited world up to his time. He remains the first extant Greek author to write about the entire extent of the known world, from the Keltic lands in the far west near the sources of the Istros⁴³ to India in the east, and from the Skythians in the north to the Aithiopians and sub-Saharan Africa in the south.⁴⁴ Without realizing it, Herodotos outlined much of the totality of the inhabited world as it was to be known in classical antiquity.

He is remembered today for his lengthy ethnographic digressions, which are without precedent in extant Greek literature. He may have relied on Hekataios for this concept, as well as local city histories within the Greek world, such as those on the foundations of Kolophon and Elea by Xenophanes,⁴⁵ or the Foundation of Cities by Charon of Lampsakos and the Periegesis of the Inhabited World by Dionysios of Miletos.⁴⁶ These works have not survived, and with the exception of those of Xenophanes, are close to Herodotos chronologically, so the question of influence is difficult to determine, but they may have helped establish the genre that he used and developed. Ephoros of Kyme, a century after Herodotos, believed that he had been influenced by Xanthos of Lydia,⁴⁷ and while it is certain that both Herodotos and Xanthos discussed similar topics, especially the formation of the earth,⁴⁸ actual chronological precedence cannot be shown.

The major ethnographic digressions in the Histories include Babylonia, the Massagetians beyond the Caspian Sea, Egypt, the Aithiopians, and the Skythians.⁴⁹ In some cases, Herodotos’ material was not superseded until modern times. There are many problems with his accounts, despite their great value, most notably that there is no evidence that Herodotos spoke or read the indigenous languages: thus he had to rely on local informants and their biases, who, like tour guides everywhere, exaggerated the virtues of their homeland and translated public inscriptions to their own advantage.⁵⁰ Herodotos felt that he was under no obligation to believe everything he had heard, but it was necessary to write it all down.⁵¹ His ability, therefore, to provide a large amount of data—even if he believed it to be incorrect—is particularly important in regard to geography. For example, his error about the Alps and Pyrenees shows the actual state of knowledge in the mid-fifth century BC, when these places were only reported through hearsay.⁵² His rejection of the Phoenician circumnavigation of Africa is based on the detail that provides the very proof of the voyage: the position of the sun.⁵³ His several theories about the cause of the flooding of the Nile include the correct one—snow melt—which he rejected (although finding it plausible) because it was thought that there could not be mountains in central Africa, since the equatorial regions were believed to be hot and dry.⁵⁴ Yet others of the same era, such as Euripides, Anaxagoras, and Demokritos, had some idea that there might be mountains in the south, but there are few specifics about their ideas on the matter.⁵⁵ Nevertheless, these are the first hints of the mountains that do exist in the regions around the source of the Nile, marking the beginning of a lengthy controversy about the nature of the land around the equator.

Herodotos, along with Xanthos of Lydia, was among the first to consider geological issues. In Egypt he noted that the delta was topographicaly anomalous (extending far out to sea) and that there were seashells in the uplands.⁵⁶ Moreover, the land of Egypt was unlike its surroundings, created by mud pouring forth from Aithiopia, and different from the sandy red soil of Libya to the west or the clayey stony soil of Syria. He also knew that the mud was pushed out to sea, as far as “a day's run from land,” which by his own definition would be 60,000–70,000 orgyiai, or about 70 miles.⁵⁷ This mud could be sounded at a depth of 11 orgyiai, or about 70 feet. Yet these were merely observations that intrigued Herodotos, and no theoretical explanation for them was advanced.

Herodotos’ loquaciousness made him a valuable source for the state of geographical knowledge by the latter fifth century BC, at the time of the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. His skill at observation and deep interest in the ethnography of remote areas provided much data for later, more scientific, geographical analysis.

Geography in Historical Writers of the Latter Fifth Century BC

By the end of the fifth century BC, geographical digressions had come to be a regular part of historical writing, following the model of Herodotos. Thucydides, for example, as preface to his account of the misbegotten Athenian invasion of 415 BC, included a report on Sicily, which is primarily historical but contains a certain amount of topography. Another topographical excursis is about the Athenian Akropolis, and there is an ethnography of the Thracians, each inserted into its relevant place in the history of the Peloponnesian War.⁵⁸ On occasion Thucydides seems to have relied on a periplous, most notably in his account of the location of Epidamnos in northwest Greece (“Epidamnos is a city on the right as one sails into the Ionian Gulf”).⁵⁹ Thucydides’ accounts do not have the exoticism that one finds in reading Herodotos, but demonstrate that history and topography had become linked.⁶⁰

An older contemporary of Thucydides, Antiochos of Syracuse, may also have been in this tradition. Only a handful of fragments of his works survives, which were titled Sikelia and On Italy (a toponym at this time referring only to the southern part of the peninsula), and which demonstrated an understanding of the topography of those regions.⁶¹ Over half the fragments were preserved by Strabo.⁶² Antiochos may have been the first Greek to discuss the founding of Rome, a tale that in its familiar version has south Italian connections.⁶³ He certainly expanded Greek knowledge of Italy from the coastal regions known to Herodotos into the interior and to the north, beyond the Bay of Naples, although, as with any fragmentary author, the true extent and tone of his works cannot be determined.

Ktesias of Knidos is problematic as an historian, but nevertheless is important in the development of geographical data. He was physician to the Persian king, Artaxerxes II, at the end of the fifth century BC, and later served as a Persian diplomat to the Greek world.⁶⁴ He had every opportunity to learn about Persia and the east, but how much he made use of this has long been debated, and he seems to have had a taste for exaggeration, the spectacular, and the fantastic, and to have been driven in part by a need to contradict Herodotos.⁶⁵ Yet this hardly means there is nothing of value in his writings.

The surviving fragments of Ktesias’ Indika are largely preserved in a summary by Photios, patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century AD. It seems to have been the first treatise devoted solely to that part of the world, preceded only by Herodotos’ chapters on the region.⁶⁶ Ktesias’ account is full of marvels—as were all other Greek works about India—yet generally the material is different from that of Herodotos. The sources remain uncertain, but for the most part they were obtained at the Persian court. One reads of a fountain of liquid gold, large serpents, the man-eating martichora (probably the tiger), the Dog-Headed People, a worm that can kill an ox, and many other strange phenomena, some of which may not seem as unusual today as they were in Ktesias’ time. The extant account is heavily slanted toward flora and fauna, with some ethnography, but no history and practically no topography. The few toponyms are difficult to identify.⁶⁷ The Indika should not be dismissed, and while it contains questionable elements, it is important in being the most complete Greek account of India before the time of Alexander the Great, thus extending the horizon of the inhabited world. Despite his sense of the exotic, Ktesias may have been a significant player in the development of geographical writing. His other geographical work, Periodos (Going Around), survives in only six fragments, which reveal that it included Egypt, the Black Sea, Anatolia, central Italy, and Libya, but nothing is known about its format other than it was at least three books long. Again there is an emphasis on the fantastic, since he mentioned the Skiapodes (“Shade-Footed People”), Libyans whose feet were so large that they could use them as sunshades.⁶⁸

In 401 BC, Cyrus (generally known as Cyrus the Younger), the satrap of western Anatolia, decided to overthrow his brother, Artaxerxes II, the Persian king, who was also Ktesias’ employer. With the assistance of a large number of Greek troops, he mounted an invasion of Persia. The attempt failed, largely because Cyrus was killed that autumn. Yet the expedition remains one of the best-known events of ancient history because of the exhaustive treatment by the Athenian Xenophon, who was a participant. His Anabasis not only recounted the journey with Cyrus but also the difficult return of the Greeks after his death.

The Anabasis (“Going Up,” a relatively new term in Xenophon's day and referring to the journey up from the coast into the interior of Asia) describes the entire expedition from its mobilization at Sardis in the spring of 401 BC to the return of the Greek forces to western Anatolia the following year, and the eventual disposition of the army in 399 BC. The forces headed inland from Sardis, and from the beginning Xenophon (whose initial role seems to have been minor) kept a log of the journey, or at least had access to the official Persian one. Rather than follow the Royal Road to the east, which Herodotos had outlined, where movements might be more easily detected, Cyrus kept to the south in the more rugged territory of Pisidia and Kilikia, reaching Dana (Tyana).⁶⁹ From here he turned south and passed through the Kilikian Gates down to the coast and the ancient and famous city of Tarsos.⁷⁰ He then headed around the northeastern end of the Mediterranean to the trading center of Myriandos,⁷¹ from where he went directly east to the Euphrates at the river crossing of Thapsakos, which is not located with certainty but would become a major point in Eratosthenes’ grid of the inhabited world.⁷² From there the expedition headed down the Euphrates, eventually engaging the forces of Artaxerxes II at Kounaxa, not far from Babylon. Here Cyrus was killed and Artaxerxes wounded; the king was attended by his physician, the historian Ktesias.⁷³

The death of Cyrus placed the Greek army in a quandary. They were far from home in hostile territory, and the purpose of the expedition had evaporated. The Persians were initially friendly, but soon turned hostile and executed the Greek commanders. The Greek troops were on their own. Eventually Xenophon emerged as the leader, and became responsible for getting them home. The return was much more difficult than the advance, as they retreated north into rugged territory populated by unfriendly mountain people. Although Xenophon recorded the march in detail, it is impossible to determine its exact route until, after many encounters with the locals, they eventually sighted the Black Sea (with their famous cry of “the sea, the sea”)⁷⁴ and a few days later reached the ancient Milesian settlement of Trapezous (modern Trabzon). From here it was merely along the coast back to the Greek heartland at the Bosporos.

The Anabasis is an unusual piece of literature, a mixture of history, autobiography, and a travel account. It was written in the third person, and the reader would never know that the Xenophon who played such a prominent role in the retreat was the author. From the point of view of geography and topography it generally does not go beyond regions known to Greeks of the period, except in some of the more remote mountain areas of eastern Anatolia, and the military quality of the treatise is always paramount. Nevertheless Xenophon recorded geographical and ethnographic details previously unknown, such as the Kardouchians and the Taochians (not even mentioned by Hekataios or Herodotos), the pernicious effects of the local honey near Trapezous, and the customs of the Mossynoikians who lived along the Black Sea.⁷⁵ And Xenophon was the first Greek to travel over the extremely rugged country from Mesopotamia to the Black Sea and to seek the source of the Euphrates, something Herodotos knew nothing about except that it originated in Armenia.⁷⁶ But the expedition did not realize that this took them into the high country in midwinter, with deep snow and a violent north wind.⁷⁷ In some ways the expedition of Xenophon is a precursor to that of Alexander the Great 70 years later, and even those of the Romans, demonstrating the expansion of the geographical horizon through military campaigns. But the experience in the snows of Armenia may have been one of the reasons Strabo wrote that field commanders ought to know geography.⁷⁸

In addition, geographical knowledge began to penetrate other scholarly disciplines. A good example is the treatise Airs, Waters, and Places, in the Hippokratic corpus.⁷⁹ It is a brief essay on the effects of climate on health, contrasting the people of the far north (the Skythians) with those of the south (the Egyptians), thus comparing the northern and southern extremities of the inhabited world. The work is not up to date on geographical theory, as it presumes only two continents (placing Egypt in Europe), but has a wide geographical range, with a detailed discussion of the region of the Phasis River and that north of the Black Sea. Its tone subordinates anthropology and geography to medicine, but it demonstrates the usefulness of geographical knowledge to medical theory.

The Zones and the Size of the Earth (Map 5)

Theorization about the nature of the inhabited world became more intense during the sixth and fifth centuries BC, given the large number of geographical facts flowing from the extremities into the Mediterranean heartland. The Pythagoreans had suggested that the world was a sphere, and even though this was not fully accepted as late as Hellenistic times, it provided a starting point. There was evidence that different places experienced different celestial phenomena, most notably the varying length of days as one went north or south, and also, roughly speaking, that it was colder to the north than to the south. These observations were used as the practical basis for theories about the overall surface of the earth.

Map 5. The zones.

Parmenides of Elea (in southern Italy) was allegedly a student of Xenophanes of Kolophon and had Pythagorean connections.⁸⁰ He was active in the early fifth century BC, and was perhaps the first to consider scientifically the nature of the whole earth. Building on the knowledge that the climate differed with latitude—although such concepts were not as yet formalized—he divided the earth into five zones.⁸¹ The zones are a concept that is more complex than it seems at first glance, for the idea requires a blending of natural philosophy, astronomy, and topography, a mixture of disciplines that became essential to geographical thought.⁸² Zonal theory is based on a spherical earth, which the natural philosophers had provided, and also a projection of the circular path of the heavenly bodies onto the surface of the earth, particularly that of the sun, as well an understanding of the types of shadows cast at different latitudes. In addition, the theory assumes an arctic circle—the circle of stars that never sets—so called because it was determined by the constellation Arktos, the Bear, which had been known since earliest times and had been of major importance to sailors.⁸³ This celestial arctic circle was also projected onto the surface of the earth.

Parmenides’ five zones were two arctic ones, two temperate ones, and a single “burned” zone, which was essentially twice the width of the others. This zone was between the tropics—the “turns”—the imaginary lines on the earth below the path of the sun at the solstices, above which the sun was seen to turn and reverse its north–south movement, and which were defined by the longest and shortest days of the year. The extant source, Strabo (from Poseidonios) has combined the views of Parmenides, Aristotle, and Poseidonios, as well as his own, but if Parmenides used the word “tropic” (tropikon), it was new terminology.⁸⁴ By Strabo's day the double width of the burned zone had become controversial, and late Hellenistic arguments center on this issue, but Parmenides’ temperate and arctic zones have remained standard. The nomenclature shows the mixture of influences: one zone has an astronomical name and the others are based on climate. This theory of zones is the first to conceptualize the surface of the entire earth, and is notable because neither Parmenides or, one presumes, anyone else from the Mediterranean, had ever been in the arctic zone, which begins hundreds of miles north of the Black Sea beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into it. Yet it was nevertheless possible to assume its existence. On the other hand, the tropic—and thus the burned zone beyond it—was more accessible, since it lay at Elephantine on the upper Nile, which Greeks had known from at least the fifth century BC.⁸⁵

Implicit in the theory, but not as yet verbalized, was the location of the known portions of the earth within its whole. Moreover, the idea of zones presumes a southern half of the earth, beyond human habitation, with a second temperate zone and then a second and southern arctic zone that were opposite to the northern ones.⁸⁶ There was probably no theorization as yet about the size of the earth, but the sense of zonal divisions and the use of astronomy to locate positions on its surface would eventually make this possible. In fact, Demokritos of Abdera, later in the fifth century BC, saw the inhabited world as an oblong, with its length (east–west) one-and-one-half times its width (north–south), which would seem to place it totally within the temperate zone.⁸⁷ The belief that the inhabited world was longer than wider is the probable origin of its visual orientation with north at the top and east and west to the right and left, which became standard from antiquity until today (with some exceptions in medieval times).⁸⁸ These theories were further refined by Plato, who spent time in Italy and Sicily and thus was exposed to Pythagorean and other western thought. He believed that the earth was exceedingly large (using a new word, pammegas), and that the inhabited portion—lying between the Pillars of Herakles and India—was only part of it. Moreover, there were many other people in places beyond these known limits.⁸⁹ He also began to consider the significance of “above” and “below” on the sphere of the earth. If one were to travel from one pole to the other, it would be seen that those in the far south would have their “feet opposite,” or antipous, another new word, more familiar in the plural as Antipodes, which eventually became a hypothetical toponym.⁹⁰ There is no evidence that Plato provided any specifics for these ideas, but it was beginning to be realized that the areas of human habitation were only a small portion of a large earth. If a comment by Horace is to be taken literally, Plato's associate, Archytas of Taras, a Pythagorean, may have been the first to attempt a determination of the size of the earth.⁹¹

Eudoxos of Knidos, a student of Archytas, was active in the first half of the fourth century BC.⁹² He was primarily a mathematician and astronomer—one of the first to consider planetary motions—yet he wrote a geographical work, Circuit of the Earth, its title reflecting that of Hekataios of Miletos a century and a half earlier.⁹³ Strabo believed that Eudoxos was a notable figure in the history of geography, and there is no doubt that his contributions were significant, although the details of his treatise remain elusive.⁹⁴ Nevertheless it was at least seven books long, perhaps the most substantial work on geography to date. Much of the extant material is about Egypt, where Eudoxos lived for some time, but the work extended to the Skythians and beyond. It may have been limited to the eastern Mediterranean and points east, although this reflects the extant fragments.⁹⁵

Eudoxos also considered the dimensions of the known inhabited world, which by now extended from the Pillars of Herakles to India and from north of the Black Sea to Aithiopia, refining Demokritos’ figures to propose that this meant its length (east–west) was twice its width (north–south).⁹⁶ Eudoxos may also have been responsible for the profound idea—which would influence exploration for the next 2,000 years—that one could reach India by sailing west from the Pillars of Herakles. The earliest extant source for this belief is Aristotle,⁹⁷ a younger contemporary of Eudoxos, but the concept fits so neatly into Eudoxos’ theories that he was probably the originator, and Aristotle may have heard it directly from him.

Such thoughts would lead naturally to consideration of the size of the earth. The earliest known figure for its circumference is 400,000 stadia, again from Aristotle, and attributed merely to “the mathematicians” but perhaps also part of Eudoxos’ treatise.⁹⁸ Eudoxos also had further thoughts about who might live in the southern temperate zone, for whom the seasons would be reversed.⁹⁹ He refined Parmenides’ vague thoughts about the terrestrial zones, developing the concept of the klima.¹⁰⁰ The word means “slope,” reflecting the perceived slope of the spherical earth from the equator to the poles. By Hellenistic times it had become the standard word for “latitude,” but it is not certain that Eudoxos had this degree of precision.¹⁰¹ Nevertheless with the zones and the realization that people lived in only a small portion of an immense earth, it became natural to see it in terms of east–west klimata: the emergence of a sense of latitudes.

Aristotle and Geography

Astonishingly, Aristotle does not seem to have written a geographical treatise, perhaps an indication that geography was still on the fringes of mainstream scholarship, yet geographical data are scattered throughout his other works, especially the Meteorologika, whose primary topic is weather phenomena.¹⁰² The section that is most geographical is a lengthy discussion about rivers, primarily about their water supply, which treats issues of flow, rain, evaporation, and the role of mountains in creating the moisture that ends up in rivers.¹⁰³ Included are various comments about the mountains and rivers of the world. The list is confused—the Paropamisos (Hindu Kush) is called Parnassos (a mountain in central Greece)—yet it reveals a breadth of knowledge about the rivers east of the Caspian as well as those in western Europe and in the north of the continent. There is also the mention of the mountains at the source of the Nile. The Chremetes, an African river flowing into the Atlantic, is otherwise only known from Hanno's periplous, a suggestion that Aristotle may have been familiar with that treatise.

Otherwise, he provided extensive information about the thoughts of his predecessors, from Thales to Eudoxos, including many of the important bits previously noted, such as the first extant figure for the circumference of the earth. He elaborated Eudoxos’ thoughts about sailing from the Pillars of Herakles to India, suggesting (rather strangely) that the presence of elephants in both northwest Africa and India (in other words, at the extremities of the inhabited world) was proof of a connection between these regions.¹⁰⁴ On a practical level, he seems to have accepted the idea that the inhabited world was encircled by a continuous External Ocean, and he had the sense of a distant sea into which the large rivers of northern Europe drained, perhaps the first glimmerings of the Rhine, Elbe, and Vistula. That he had some knowledge of Europe beyond the Alps—although his source is unknown—is demonstrated by one new toponym—the Arkynian Mountains—which were north of the Istros (Danube), and are presumably the forested uplands beyond that river.¹⁰⁵ Aristotle also stressed Eudoxos’ view that the length of the inhabited world was more than its width, providing a ratio of 5:3 for length (Pillars of Herakles to India) to width (Aithiopia to Lake Maiotis), the first attempt to construct relative distances across the inhabited world. He based his conclusions on travelers’ reports, which would remain the standard means of obtaining geographical data throughout antiquity. He also defined the boundaries of the inhabited world: in the east and west there was the External Ocean, in the north regions too cold for people to live in, and in the south excessive heat. Finally, he established the term for the inhabited world, oikoumene, a new word: whether or not Aristotle invented it is not clear.¹⁰⁶ His contemporary, Demosthenes, used it to characterize the civilized, or Greek, world in contrast to those not civilized (to Demosthenes, the Macedonians), a definition that, needless to say, would soon become obsolete.¹⁰⁷ Yet as a geographical term for the inhabited portion of the earth, as opposed to that which was uninhabited, it would remain standard diction throughout antiquity.

New Geographical Knowledge of the Early Fourth Century BC

The first half of the fourth century BC was a fertile period for geographical theorization, yet there was relatively little exploration or toponymic expansion in the period between Xenophon's expedition and that of Alexander the Great, 70 years later. There is some evidence for additional Greek knowledge of the Atlantic coast south of the Pillars of Herakles, which had been previously explored by the Carthaginians. Although the early Greek investigations of Euthymenes were kept secret by the Massalians and were not generally disseminated, a few Greeks may have penetrated into the area: a cluster of Central Greek names (Kephisos, Kotes, and Pontion) is a memory of someone from that region who reached the Atlantic coast of Africa. The location of these places is uncertain but they are probably not far south of Cape Spartel, the northwest corner of the continent, demonstrating that this unknown Central Greek did not go a great distance along this alien and hostile coast.¹⁰⁸ The source for the names is the Periplous of Pseudo-Skylax, a description of the coast of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with inclusion of a small part of the adjacent Atlantic littoral. In late antiquity, this was believed to be the work of Skylax of Karyanda, the explorer of Dareios I of Persia, but it actually dates from the early 330s BC, reflecting the world just before the accession of Alexander the Great in 336 BC.¹⁰⁹ It seems to be a compilation of earlier data and not an eye-witness report, by an author whose identity is unknown. Although much of it describes coasts well known to contemporary Greeks, at the end of the work is a single chapter on the Atlantic coast of Africa, and which provides new information, the first extant Greek account of this region. As expected, seamanship and mercantile information dominate the report: there are great reefs beyond Cape Hermaia, and a rich trading process took place at the Carthaginian outpost of Kerne, where Attic pottery and other items were available, something supported by archaeology.¹¹⁰ The area was still very much under Carthaginian control in the mid-fourth century BC, but nevertheless a few Greeks and some Greek trade objects had penetrated the region.

Also in the fourth century BC, Greeks became aware of Carthaginian reports of a fertile island in the Atlantic, discovered at an uncertain date, when (inevitably) ships were off course due to a storm.¹¹¹ This seems to be one of the Madeira islands, which lie 360 miles from Africa and 425 miles from the Iberian mainland. The island remained outside the mainstream of Greek knowledge, and in fact came to be identified with the mythical Blessed Island of Homer. It was one of the more remote places known to classical antiquity.¹¹² The Azores, 480 miles farther northwest, may also have been visited by the Carthaginians, and Greek coins from Kyrene have been found on the island of Corvo, but the uncertainty of the published report and inconclusive archaeological investigations mean that it is impossible to conclude whether the islands were visited—in anything beyond a brief, accidental manner—in ancient times.¹¹³

There seems to have been some additional awareness of Europe north of the Alps, although the data are especially vague. Herodotos believed that the source of the Istros (Danube) was at the town of Pyrene, a misapprehension of the topography of central Europe based on reports from near the mouth of the river.¹¹⁴ Aristotle, however, knew of the forested lands to the north of the Istros and the great rivers flowing toward the North Sea and Baltic, without reporting their names. The Rhine (Rhenos in Greek, Rhenus in Latin) is not cited with certainty in extant literature until the time of Julius Caesar, but his Hellenized spelling suggests a Greek source, probably Poseidonios.¹¹⁵ The Vistula may have been known as early as the latter fourth century BC, if Pytheas of Massalia got that far.¹¹⁶ It lay on the ancient amber route, and would have been approached from the Mediterranean before the Greeks learned about the more western rivers of the north. Other northern rivers are identified only later.

A certain Timagetos wrote On Harbors, probably in the early fourth century BC.¹¹⁷ Both work and author are obscure, but he placed the source of the Istros in a Keltic lake, perhaps early knowledge of the Swiss lakes. The extent of the work is unknown, yet five of the six existing fragments concern the course of the Istros (in the context of the return of the Argonauts), and Timagetos may have had access to material about northern Europe that was also used by Aristotle.

There was further interest in the source of the Nile, a continual intellectual problem that lasted until the nineteenth century. The mountains of central Africa had been uncertainly known since the fifth century BC, and Aristotle was the first to record a name for them, Argyos, or Silver. This was eventually eclipsed by that provided by the geographer Ptolemy: Selene,¹¹⁸ more familiar in its anglicized version, the Mountains of the Moon, the great goal of nineteenth-century explorers searching for the source of the Nile. There is also the first hint of the marshes of the upper Nile, the modern Sudd of Southern Sudan.¹¹⁹

Ephoros of Kyme

By 335 BC there was an extensive amount of toponymic data available to the Greek world. The inhabited portion—the oikoumene—extended around the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and some distance into the interior. There was also comprehension, in varying degrees of detail and reliability, of what lay beyond: the Keltic lands in the west, the rivers north of the Alps and those entering the Black Sea, the Caspian and the regions beyond, India, the upper Nile, and sub-Saharan Africa. There were still many gaps and inaccuracies: the Arabian peninsula, for example, was almost totally unknown, except as the origin of frankincense.¹²⁰ The region between Persia and India remained uncertain, and there was only the faintest sense of Europe north of the Alps. Any land beyond these limits was considered uninhabitable due to either cold or heat. Nevertheless the circuit of the oikoumene was extensive. Parallel to this topographic knowledge was a developing theoretical structure that was based on a spherical earth, with the first rudimentary attempts to define its surface, even beyond the oikoumene, through analogy with the celestial sphere. There was also the realization that the earth was exceedingly large and the inhabited portion only a small part of it. Details were lacking but it was possible that there might even be other inhabited portions, somewhere in the great External Ocean that surrounded the oikoumene.

Yet there was no organization of these thoughts—whether theoretical or topographical—into a discipline of geography. The two paths of inquiry were being considered separately: theoretical matters were the concern of the natural philosophers and astronomers, and topography that of sailors, merchants, and governments. Much that could be called geographical had been recorded in Greek literature—far more than survives today—from Homer to the anonymous author known as Pseudo-Skylax, yet no treatise on geography had as yet been written, not even as a cohesive portion of another work. Hekataios perhaps had come the closest, but his Circuit of the Earth, in so far as it is known today, lacked any scientific theories or overall conception of the entire earth. Eudoxos’ work of the same name may have been more scientific but topographically it was limited. The periplooi were two-dimensional, generally restricted to coastal toponyms and land forms. Other geographical data lie buried in works whose focus is essentially not geographical, in particular the material recorded by Herodotos.

The first significant step toward creating a discipline of geography (still without the use of the word itself) was taken by Ephoros, who came from Kyme, an Aiolian city on the coast of Anatolia.¹²¹ Little is known about his life, but he survived into the first years of the reign of Alexander the Great (which began in 336 BC). He wrote the first universal history, in other words, one whose topic was not, like the works of Herodotos, Thucydides, and Xenophon, limited to a specific period or topic, but which included the whole of human history. In 30 books, it was probably the longest treatise as yet written, extending from the mythological period to the siege of Perinthos in 341 BC.¹²² The work is not extant, but was widely cited in Hellenistic times, especially by Diodoros, Strabo, and Plutarch, and exists today in nearly 250 fragments.

Ephoros is important in the history of geography because within the context of his lengthy treatise he included a section specifically on that topic, appearing in Books 4 and 5. It is possible that these two books could have stood alone as a seminal independent work on the subject. Book 4, at least by Hellenistic times, was titled “Europe”;¹²³ the scope of Book 5 is more difficult to determine, since the few extant fragments include the Black Sea region, Greece, and Libya.¹²⁴ Ephoros opened his geography by dividing the inhabited world into four portions, each defined by an ethnic group, and using both the prevailing winds and the positions of the sunrise and sunset at different times of the year to determine their direction from the Mediterranean world, thus for the first time joining astronomy and topography. As Strabo reported:

in his treatise On Europe he says—dividing the regions of the heavens and earth into four parts—that the Indians will be toward the Apeliotes wind, the Aithiopians toward the Notos, the Kelts toward the sunset, and the Skythians toward the boreal wind. He adds that Aithiopia and Skythia are the larger, for he says that it seems the Aithiopian peoples extend from the winter sunrise as far as the sunset, and Skythia lies directly opposite them.¹²⁵

All four of the ethnic groups cited had long been considered the most remote of peoples, and this is the earliest known attempt to conceive of the entire oikoumene and to create a universal set of reference points for distant places, although the scheme only works from a Mediterranean viewpoint.

It is unfortunate that fewer than 20 fragments survive from Books 4 and 5, but Ephoros’ relevance to geography is demonstrated by the fact that one-fifth of the extant fragments of his entire corpus (45 in number)—many of which are quite lengthy—are recorded by the geographer Strabo. They cover a wide range thoughout the inhabited world, with extensive ethnographic discussions. There was probably more detail than ever about the north—the Keltic and Skythian world—including (without providing a name) the first specific report on the North Sea and its low-lying coasts that were often affected by storm surges and tides.¹²⁶ But the real significance of Ephoros in emergent geographical study was his ability to look at the oikoumene as a whole and to bring astronomical data into the ethnographic discussion. Although it would be more than a century before the discipline of geography was formalized—by Eratosthenes of Kyrene—Ephoros moved closer than anyone previous to writing a treatise on the topic.