Discoveries
Discoveries
Philosophers. Ignorance of the landscape did not come about for the Romans from lack of trying. Travelers of all varieties—generals, merchants, tourists, and so forth—studied the geographic texts and theories that were available to them from Hellenistic scholars. Most of these earlier philosophers at least had realized that the world was round; Eratosthenes even calculated the length of the equator; his estimate of 252,000 stades (approximately 27,967 miles) is a little over the true measurement (24,902 miles), despite his complete ignorance of the Americas. Many of the Hellenistic geographers also believed that their plot of inhabited land was surrounded by a great ocean on all sides; technically correct if one thinks only of the three continents—Europe, Africa, and Asia—that each branch off from the central Mediterranean (central, that is, to their understanding). One influential account in particular was that of Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus) of the second century C.E., who carefully plotted his map on a sphere with the use of latitude and longitude lines as markers. His ideas were used in the Arab world and Byzantine empire for centuries after the fall of Rome. Dissenting opinions, which stated that the world was either flat or cylindrical were rare by the Roman period, but even in these cases, the theory of a huge perimeter ocean and a tripartite division of land, based loosely on what is now known to be three continents, prevailed.
Explorers. As early as the Republic, Romans were sponsoring expeditions to learn more about the territories beyond their scope. In the 140s b.c.e. the historian Polybius, with the financial support of Scipio Aemilianus, traveled beyond the Strait of Gibraltar to explore the West African coastline. He returned safely, but it is not known what he saw or how far he went. Later, during the Principate, emperors regularly supported missions of discovery in every corner of the empire. Augustus sent explorers to Dacia to learn the nature of the major rivers there, and he sent Juba II, the king of Mauretania, eastward to study Parthia before his grandson, Gaius Caesar, was to embark on a campaign into the region. Juba also wrote of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic and the source of the Nile in Nubia. At the request of Claudius, Gaius Suetonius Paulinus traversed, for the first time, the Atlas Mountains in northwest Africa, and Nero had the regions around the Red Sea carefully mapped by his own praetorians. The explorative journeys often took the form of periploi (singular, periplus, a Latinization of the Greek periplous) —literally, “sailing around” an unknown territory.
Army Scouts. Roman legions, each with officers responsible for reconnoitering, gathered much of the reliable and systematic information about geography, as their forays into uncharted territory had the benefit of large numbers of witnesses (soldiers) and the strength of arms. The fact-finding voyages listed in the preceding paragraph each served a direct military purpose; to them one could add the explorations of Britain and the Shetland Islands by Agricola, the governor of Britain who ordered a battery of ships to circumnavigate the islands in 83-84 C.E. and to map the results. Epigraphic evidence shows that the position of explorator, or scout, became a regular post in a military career. They were organized into special units, each with their own centurions and, in the case of the land north ofHadrian’s Wall, their own camp.
Merchants. The incentive of profits inspired many merchants to become the vanguard of Roman exploration, venturing abroad even before the army. Trade moved in both directions: Roman goods and currency were useful to non-Romans, while it was also affordable for Romans to acquire raw materials from abroad, and even fashionable to own a piece of a non-Roman culture. Julius Caesar, when he plotted a crossing of the English Channel from Gaul in 55 b.c.e., first turned for information to Roman merchants, whom, he said, had gone well beyond the coast. Much knowledge of India, especially its cycle of monsoons, was disseminated under Augustus by merchants who had conducted business there, and under Nero, merchants were the first to understand parts of northwestern Europe, owing to their quest for new sources of amber, a precious commodity in Roman jewelry manufacturing. After the Roman armies had established a foothold in certain territories, merchants often were the first nonmartial residents there. It was a risky endeavor: families of traders in North Africa were slaughtered by Jugurtha in 112 b.c.e. and in Asia Minor by Mithridates in 89-88 b.c.e. Hoards of Roman coins have been found in places strangely remote from the Roman center—from Britain, to Romania, to Sri Lanka.
Embassies and Diplomacy. The Romans might have gotten their information indirectly by waiting for and interrogating non-Romans who came to them. In the Republic, international diplomacy was well developed, and ambassadors from around the Mediterranean came to Rome to negotiate alliances or to plot betrayals. The Romans would not have passed on the chance to inquire about their native lands. According to Augustus’s Res gestae, the emperor received ambassadors from India, China, Parthia, Armenia, Spain, Britain, and Germany, and the custom continued well into the empire. In 39 C.E. the emperor Caligula interrogated an embassy of Jews in Rome; he asked not just about their petition, but also about their cultural practices, such as their refusal to eat pork. Part of the diplomatic process in the ancient world was the exchange of young men and women between the center and the peripheral communities. A prominent non-Roman who might want to align himself with the new imperial power might send his son to Rome for an education, or offer a daughter or sister in marriage, or encourage other youths to fight for the Roman armies. From conversations and daily interactions with these individuals, the Romans could learn more about geography and foreign cultures. Women such as the Italian Thesmusa, who married the Parthian king Phraataces during the reign of Augustus, and the imperial princess Galla Placidia, who married the Gothic king Athaulf centuries later in 410 C.E., would have been valuable sources of knowledge to both sides. The German brothers Flavus and Arminius, who were recruited to the Roman soldiery and even rose through the ranks, could have taught their new comrades about aspects of German language, religion, and geography. When neighbors of the empire did not volunteer to submit such wards, the Romans might demand them and later use them for information. Juba II, a Numidian prince who was taken as a hostage when an infant, wrote a treatise on Africa that received wide distribution in the Roman world. Josephus, a Jewish general who was seized in the Jewish revolt at Jotapota, wrote a history of the Jews for Roman consumption.
UNCHARTED SEAS
In 44 C.E., Pomponius Mela published a description of the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea and what is now known to be the Atlantic coast of Western Europe. At times, he lists the sources of his information, but nevertheless is frequently vague or completely inaccurate. Such was the nature of Roman geography and the perpetual incentive for continued exploration.
The following excerpt from his work describes the waters and coasts of the Caspian Sea, which he erroneously believed was connected to the north Atlantic. The anxieties felt by his readers for the dangers of faraway places are obvious.
The Caspian Sea first breaks into the land like a river, with a strait as small as it is long, and after it has entered by its straight channel, the sea is diffused into three bays. Opposite its very mouth, it passes into the Bay of Hyrcania; on the left, into Scythian Bay; and on the right, into the one they call by the name of the whole, Caspian Bay. The sea as a whole is violent, savage, without harbors, exposed to storms everywhere, as well as crowded with sea-monsters more than any other sea is, and for all these reasons it is not fully navigable. To the right as you enter, the Scythian Nomads occupy the shores of the strait. To the interior, beside Caspian Bay, are the Caspians and the Amazons.... The forests also bear other fierce animals, but they even bear tigers—Hyrcanian ones, to be sure—a savage breed of wild animal so swift that they easily, and typically, track a mounted rider, even one passing at a distance; and they do it not once only but several times, even when the trail is retraced each time right from where it began.... For quite some time it was unclear what lay beyond the Caspian Bay, whether it was the same Ocean or a hostile, cold land that extended without a border and without end . . . Metellus reported it as follows: when [he] was proconsul of Gaul, certain Indians were presented to him as a gift by the king of the Boil By asking what route they had followed to reach there, he learned that they had been snatched by storm from Indian waters, that they had traversed the intervening region, and that finally they had arrived on the shores of Germany. Therefore, the sea is continuous, but the rest of that same coast is frozen by the unremitting cold and is therefore deserted.
Source: Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World, translated by F. E. Romer (Aim Arbor; University of Michigan Press, 1998).
Sources
N. J. E. Austin and N. B. Rankov, Exploratio: Military and Political Intelligence in the Roman World from the Second Punic War to the Battle of Adrianople (London & New York: Routledge, 1995).
A. D. Lee, Information and Frontiers: Roman Foreign Relations in Late Antiquity (Cambridge &, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).