The connection between experience and text

Throughout classical antiquity, people travelled. Men sailed for commercial purposes and on coasting voyages around the Mediterranean; officials travelled by land for administrative purposes at the time of the high Roman Empire; pilgrims made their way to places of religious and cultural significance; wealthy intellectuals went on tourist trips to Athens or Egypt; and military expeditions, such as the Athenian force that sailed to Sicily in 415 bce, or the Roman military expeditions to Britain (led by Caesar in 55 and 54 bce) and to Africa (under Tiberius in 17 ce, to quell the revolt of Tacfarinas), combined land and sea travel. The movement of individuals and groups was thus varied in regard to means of transport, goals, geographical scope and, most important, the written outcome of the experiences.

The ancients, and specifically the Greeks, who were pioneers in intellectual, geographical and scientific endeavours, became acquainted with their world through travel and scientific conjectures, the results of both of which were eventually conveyed in literary form. First came travel. Greek civilization grew up in settlements on islands or near coasts around the Mediterranean, on its European, Asian and African shores and on the Black Sea coastline. This situation required constant maritime journeys to purchase and exchange goods, as well as to meet cultural and social needs. Sailing thus became an integral part of daily life and opened the route for further, planned journeys, which eventually produced an acquaintance with new regions. Naval warfare, which had begun in the late seventh century bce, also developed in the fifth century bce, particularly in response to the Persian invasions. These intentions required familiarity with sea-routes, harbours, coastal topography and other local details, all essential for both merchants and warriors. Travel was also undertaken, even if less often, for pilgrimage (to oracular or healing shrines), to take part in the Olympic and Pythian games, for tourism and for intellectual purposes and encounters. Land journeys too were undertaken for all these purposes, and in the time of the Roman Empire, massive military campaigns and frequent administrative traffic made use of paved routes throughout the Empire. Practical needs were common to all motivations for travel.

Epic, myth and poetry

The prehistoric clay tablets inscribed in Linear B script and archaeological evidence expose the nature of geographical perception in Mycenaean culture. The ‘Pylian geography’ from the south-western Peloponnese included lists of toponyms arranged from north to south, showing that the Mycenaeans utilized a number of basic spatial concepts and could conceive of a systematic, consistent conceptualization of their surroundings. A more solid starting-point for the history of ancient geography, however, as the ancients themselves realized, is the earliest literary evidence from the Greek world: the Homeric epics (c. 700 bce).

Geographical issues were by no means reserved for prose compositions: numerous geographical details, concepts and descriptions appear in the Greek and Roman poetic corpora. As the section that follows is designed to demonstrate, early myths, which were at first orally transmitted, were moulded into new poetic patterns while preserving reminiscences of geographical situations from previous generations. These myths are thus important evidence for any discussion of geography in antiquity. Another area of study connected to the ties between poetry and geography is the inspection of the sporadic geographical titbits preserved in poetic genres such as epic and drama. But most important and most curious are poetic compositions – both Greek and Roman – devoted entirely to geographical themes. As will be argued below, even scientific geography used poetic expressions. A general survey of evidence drawn from poetic myths, passing poetic references and surviving complete texts shows that poems in various ages revealed a consistent worldview.

Shapes and sizes

Our mental image of the world is always based on a combination of actual geographical knowledge and imagination, that is, on a mix of directly experienced and abstractly conceived space. In antiquity, when remote regions were still inaccessible, legendary elements played a larger role. But after travel and conquest increased direct acquaintance with distant frontiers, solid facts based on autopsy began to support more accurate reports and theories.

Early notions of the world occasionally combined myths with real facts derived from experience. At the same time, in the Archaic period (seventh–sixth centuries bce) a rationalistic approach to understanding the universe and the world emerged. This tendency sought scientific explanations based on sensory assessment and logical inference, and produced the mathematical branch of geographical discussion. This approach continued to be practised thereafter throughout antiquity alongside the descriptive one. As was argued in chapter 2, the descriptive approach did not refrain from considering marvellous and paradoxical situations in a way contradictory to scientific thinking. But the factual foundation of both branches solidified with the growth in direct knowledge of remote regions.

A pre-modern world

In 1986, seven maps drawn in ink on thin pieces of wood were discovered in thegrave of a military officer buried around 239 bce; themaps represent a small region at a scale of c. 1:300,000.Already in 1973, the excavation of the grave of a ruler of 168bce had brought to light a map of a larger region;on it, drawn to a scale of c. 1:180,000, were marked plains,mountains, rivers, roads and places with standardized symbols and names. Thesame grave preserved another map, which presented a detail of the same region,at a scale c. 1:100,000, marking forts and lines of defence.During their lifetimes, the officer and the ruler had both apparently had accessto scale maps that were so important to them that they were buried with them. Wealso have literary evidence from the same period of the use of maps. Ahistorical work from the second/first centurybce, for example, relates that in 227bce the son of a ruler ordered a man to kill aneighbouring dynast. To get close to his intended victim, the killer pretendedto want to offer the dynast a map sent to him as a present by his master. Hegained access to the man and was able to conceal a dagger in the map roll. Butthe victim survived and founded his own dynasty. Twenty years later, in 207bce, his capital was attacked, and, although thesoldiers could have ransacked the palace and looted its treasures, they wereinterested only in the administrative centre with its archive and its maps– which ultimately contributed to the formation of a new dynasty thatlasted until 9 ce.

The pre-modern world to which these artefacts and stories belong is not that ofGreece and Rome. Rather, the events described above took place in ancient China;there are no comparable examples from the ancient Mediterranean. Is this lack ofevidence from the classical world merely a coincidence? Or is it a consequenceof a feature of pre-modern Europe, in which ‘high culture’ formsonly a thin ‘veneer’, as Patricia Crone argues in her study of(non-classical) pre-industrial societies:

Outline and goals

Today one can remain comfortably at home and, with a single click of the mouse, take a detailed look at a street-corner in a city on the other side of the world, examine a river delta in a remote continent, or learn the dimensions of a mountain hundreds of kilometres away. In antiquity, an age when individuals rarely left their birthplace, horizons were narrow and bounded by unknown and frightening regions, and instruments were simple. How could men discover that the earth was round? How did they estimate its size? How did traders and settlers look for new territory in unknown regions? How did generals set out with armies from Greece to Iran or India? The Greeks and Romans did all that and more, and produced achievements that in many ways still form the basis of our own ideas of geography.

Geography – literally a written or drawn description of the earth (gê) – always and everywhere originates in an awareness of one’s own surroundings, in encounters with foreign places and peoples and, like any human realm of knowledge, in simple curiosity and the wish to define observed phenomena. These three motives – awareness, encounters and curiosity – must have existed in the early periods of Greek cultural formation, and persisted in various degrees throughout antiquity. Greek studies of landscapes and the environment, along with an interest in remote regions and ideas about the shape of the earth, prevailed long before these issues were recognized as a discipline.