Voyage of Pytheas (c. 325 BCE)

Record

Pytheas described his travels in a work that has not survived; only excerpts remain, quoted or paraphrased by later authors. Much of what is known about Pytheas comes from commentary written by historians during the classical period hundreds of years after Pytheas's journeys occurred, most familiarly in Strabo's Geographica (late 1st century BC, or early 1st century AD), passages in the world history written by Diodorus of Sicily between 60 and 30 BC, and Pliny's Natural History (AD 77).

Diodorus does not mention Pytheas by name. The association is made as follows: Pliny reports: "Timaeus says there is an island named Mictis [...] where tin is found, and to which the Britons cross." Diodorus says that tin was brought to the island of Ictis, where there was an emporium. Walbank (1956), Mette (1952) and Roller (2006) agree that Diorodus' information on the British Isles is an epitome of Pytheas via Timaeus.

Dating the voyage

Pliny said that Timaeus (born about 350 BC) believed Pytheas's story of the discovery of amber. First century BC Strabo said that Dicaearchus (died about 285 BC) did not trust the stories of Pytheas. None of Aristotle's works mention Pytheas, nor do those of Ephorus. Thus the terminus post quem for Pytheas’s voyage are the works of Aristotle and Ephorus, and the terminus ante quem is that of Aristotle's student, Dicaearchus. Henry Fanshawe Tozer estimated that Pytheas's voyage occurred about 330 BC, derived from three main sources.

The earliest extant author to quote Pytheas explicitly is Hipparcus, however he is also widely quoted explicitly by other later authors such as Polybius, Cleomides, Geminus and Aetius; perhaps the last was Dicuil. By far, the most quotations of Pytheas survive in Pliny and Strabo, however they seem to be quoting Pytheas as a tertiary source, perhaps through Timaeus. The Naturalis Historia and Geographica demonstrate that Pytheas was also used by a range of Hellenistic authors starting with Dicaearchus, Timaeus, Eratosthenes, Polybius, Artemidorus and Xenophon of Lampsacus. The extent to which Hecataeus of Abdera's On the Hyperboreans may have been inspired by Pytheas is not known.

Circumstances of the voyage

Pytheas was the first documented Mediterranean mariner to reach the British Isles.

The start of Pytheas's voyage is unknown. The Carthaginians had closed the Strait of Gibraltar to all ships from other nations. Some historians, mainly of the late 19th century and early, speculated that he must have traveled overland to the mouth of the Loire or the Garonne. Others believed that, to avoid the Carthaginian blockade, he may have stayed close to land and sailed only at night, or taken advantage of a temporary lapse in the blockade.

An alternate theory is that by the 4th century BC, the western Greeks, especially the Massaliotes, were on amicable terms with Carthage. In 348 BC, Carthage and Rome came to terms over the Sicilian Wars with a treaty defining their mutual interests. Rome could use Sicilian markets, Carthage could buy and sell goods at Rome, and slaves taken by Carthage from allies of Rome were to be set free. Rome was to stay out of the western Mediterranean, but these terms did not apply to Massalia, which had its own treaty.

Voyage to Britain

Strabo reported that Pytheas said he "travelled over the whole of Britain that was accessible". Because there are scant first-hand sources available regarding Pytheas's journey, historians have looked at the etymology for clues about the route he took up the north Atlantic.

The first known written use of the word Britain was an ancient Greek transliteration of the original P-Celtic term. It is believed to have appeared within a periplus by Pytheas, but no copies of this work survive.

Opposite Europe in Diodorus is the promontory (akrōtērion) of Kantion (Kent), 100 stadia, about 11 miles (18 km), from the land, but the text is ambiguous: "the land" could be either Britain or the continent.

The inhabitants of Cornwall were involved in the manufacture of tin ingots. They mined the ore, smelted it and then worked it into pieces in the shape of knuckle-bones, after which it was transported to the island of Ictis by wagon, which could be done at low tide.

Thule

Strabo, taking his text from Polybius, related that "Pytheas asserts that he explored in person the whole northern region of Europe as far as the ends of the world." Strabo did not believe it but he explained what Pytheas meant by the ends of the world. Thoulē, he said (now spelled Thule; Pliny the Elder uses Tyle; Vergil references ultima Thule in Georgic I, Line 30, where the ultima refer to the end of the world) is the most northerly of the British Isles. There the circle of the summer tropic is the same as the Arctic Circle (see below on Arctic Circle). Moreover, said Strabo, none of the other authors mention Thule, a fact which he used to discredit Pytheas, but which to moderns indicates Pytheas was the first explorer to arrive there and tell of it.

Thule was described as an island six days' sailing north of Britain, near the frozen sea (pepēguia thalatta, "solidified sea"). Pliny added that it had no nights at midsummer when the sun was passing through the sign of the Crab (at the summer solstice), a reaffirmation that it is on the Arctic Circle. He added that the crossing to Thule started at the island of Berrice, "the largest of all", which may be Lewis in the outer Hebrides.

Encounter with drift ice

A Tyle unius diei navigatione mare concretum a nonnullis Cronium appellatur. [One day's sail from Thule is the frozen ocean, called by some the Cronian Sea.]

Pytheas also spoke of the waters around Thule and of those places where land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a "marine lung", in which it was said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail.

The term used for "marine lung" (pleumōn thalattios) appears to refer to jellyfish of the type the ancients called sea-lung. The latter are mentioned by Aristotle in On the Parts of Animals as being free-floating and insensate. They are not further identifiable from what Aristotle says but some pulmones appear in Pliny as a class of insensate sea animal; specifically the halipleumon ("salt-water lung"). William Ogle, a major translator and annotator of Aristotle, attributes the name sea-lung to the lung-like expansion and contraction of the Medusae, a kind of Cnidaria, during locomotion. The ice resembled floating circles in the water. The modern English term for this phenomenon is pancake ice.

Discovery of the Baltic

Strabo said that Pytheas gave an account of "what is beyond the Rhine as far as Scythia", which he, Strabo, thought was false. In the geographers of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, such as Ptolemy, Scythia stretched eastward from the mouth of the river Vistula; thus Pytheas must have described the Germanic coast of the Baltic Sea; if the statement is true, there are no other possibilities. As to whether he explored it in person, he said that he explored the entire north in person (see under Thule above). As the periplus was a sort of ship's log, he probably did reach the Vistula.

According to The Natural History by Pliny the Elder:Pytheas* speaks of an estuary of the Ocean named Metuonis and extending for 750 miles, the shores of which are inhabited by a German tribe, the Guiones. From here it is a day's sail to the Isle of Abalus, to which, he states, amber is carried in spring by currents, being an excretion consisting of solidified brine. He adds that the inhabitants of the region use it as fuel instead of wood and sell it to the neighbouring Teutones. His belief is shared by Timaeus, who, [c. 356-260] however, calls the island Basilia. Philemon denies the suggestion that amber gives off a flame.

Voyage to the Don

Pytheas claimed to have explored the entire north; however, he turned back at the mouth of the Vistula, the border with Scythia. If he had gone on he would have discovered the ancestral Balts. They occupied the lands to the east of the Vistula. In the west they began with the people living around Frisches Haff, Lithuanian Aismarės, "sea of the Aistians", who in that vicinity became the Baltic Prussians. On the east Herodotus called them the Neuri, a name related to Old Prussian narus, "the deep", in the sense of water country. Later Lithuanians would be "the people of the shore". The Vistula was the traditional limit of Greater Germany. Place names featuring *ner- or *nar- are wide-ranging over the vast Proto-Baltic homeland, occupying western Russia before the Slavs.

Herodotus said that the Neuri had Scythian customs, but they were at first not considered Scythian. During the war between the Scythians and the Persian Empire, the Scythians came to dominate the Neuri. Strabo denied that any knowledge of the shores of the eastern Baltic existed. He had heard of the Sauromatai, but had no idea where to place them.

Herodotus had mentioned these Sauromatai as a distinct people living near the Neuri.