A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ and more used for schoinoi on the Nile, where a schoinos denoted the interval between each of the cities, which were not equidistant (17.1.24, 11.11.5). The anonymous late ninth-century Byzantine Sylloge Tacticorum, preserved in a single codex (Laur. 75.6), contains a short passage on distance units. It states that the Persian parasang had a variable measure, from Xenophon’s 30 stades to 60 for others, as reported by Strabo in a quote from Posidonius (Edelstein and Kidd 1989, F203). It is suggested that this author, instead of directly consulting Strabo, took this material from other secondary sources on either Strabo or Posidonius’s scientific writings (Kidd 1988: 729–730).

      Roman explorers measured in miles (milia passuum), and Strabo (Strabo 7.7.4; fr. 56 (Jones)) reported that most people counted eight stades to the mile, although Polybius (Polyb. 34.12.4) added an extra two plethra, or one-third of a stade, making eight and one-third stades equal to one Roman mile. Walbank suggested that Polybius’s amendment was for greater accuracy over long distances and easier mathematical conversions from miles to stades (Walbank 1979, iii. 624): to convert m.p. to stades one simply multiplies the distance by 25 and divides by 3. The Sylloge Tacticorum author also comments upon conversions to miles in Strabo, mistaking Polybius’s eight and one-third stades to the mile as a proposal of eight and one-quarter by Eratosthenes, and he asserts that the mile was now conventionally reckoned as seven and one-half stades, a calculation also appearing in Aelian’s Tactica (Kidd 1988: 730). Censorinus (de die nat. 13.2), who wrote in the first half of the third century CE, went so far as to call the stade that was one-eighth of a mile (625 Roman feet) the “Italic stade” (Morgan 1973: 30). Roman authors generally used stades when handling material taken from the Greek geographers or when dealing with nautical distances, and except for a few exceptional uses of the stade, they employed miles for all land measurements taken by Roman surveyors (Morgan 1973: 34–35; Arnaud 1993: 242).

       Sea-Faring

The same method of measuring journeys by stops along a route was employed for sea travel recorded in the Periploi texts for the Phoenician and Arabian coasts. A Periplus was literally a “sailing around,” and was used as a title for several Greco-Roman texts giving the sailing distances around the Mediterranean sea, the Black Sea, and Indian Ocean. Sometimes the term paraplus, or “a sailing alongside,” is employed instead. Like Stathmoi texts, Periploi used a combination of distance units (based on variable sailing times as well as different measurement units, see Arnaud 1993: 231ff) and noted information about regions, cities, harbors, flora, fauna, commodities, and political curiosities along the routes described. Also like the land geographies, the Periploi were written to satisfy a number of different aims, some for practical application by navigators, others for more theoretical exercises. The earliest known Periplus is credited to Scylax of Caryanda, commissioned by Darius I to explore the Indus river and Indian Ocean.⁴ In the mid-fourth century BCE, an author now known as Pseudo-Scylax wrote a Periplus of the Mediterranean, which includes a description of the Syrian and Phoenician coast and so is a useful source for what was known of this region at the outset of the Hellenistic period (Müller, GGM I, xxxiii–li, 15–96). This text is wrongly attributed to Scylax of Caryanda (see Shipley 2011: 4–6), and it is now thought that it was not based on first-hand exploration, but worked more as philosophical geography. Alexander’s fleet-commander Nearchus and court historian Onesicritus wrote up accounts of their 326–325 BCE voyage from the Indus eastward to the Persian Gulf, which served as sources for Strabo and Pliny (HN 6.96, 109, 124; FGrH 133; Pearson 1960: 112ff). In 324 BCE Alexander sent out several explorers along the Arabian coast, including Androsthenes of Thasos, who had also traveled with Nearchus and wrote Periplus of the Indian Coast, a source used by Eratosthenes and Athenaeus (Strabo 16.3.2; Athen. 3.93b; FGrH 711; Wirth, “Androsthenes 4,” Der Kleine Pauly, 350–351; Potts 1990: 5). Other reports from sea expeditions sent by Alexander and the Ptolemies informed the historian and geographer Agatharchides of Cnidus (c. 200–c. 145 BCE) who wrote On the Erythraean Sea, known from excerpts in Diodorus Siculus (3.12–48), Strabo (16.5.5–20), and Photius (Bibliotheca Codex 250) (FGrH 86, Müller, GGM I, liv–lxxiii, 111–194; Burstein 1989: 30–32, 176ff).

In the second century BCE the Greeks learned about the monsoon winds, what they called the etesian (annual) winds, which permitted long-distance open-sea travel to India at certain times of year. Strabo (2.3.4) seems to report an early discovery of the monsoons in his account of the hapless Eudoxus of Cyzicus who made two voyages across the Indian Ocean for Ptolemy Physcon and Cleopatra III in c. 117–116 BCE, while the author of the Periplus Maris Erythraei (dated to the mid-first century CE based on a reference to Malichus II of Nabataea, r. 40–70 CE) credits a fellow sea-captain named Hippalos. It is possible that both attributions are correct and that other Hellenistic sea-farers independently noticed the phenomenon, but Strabo obtained his reference for the winds from a text, in this case Posidonius’s history of Eudoxus’s misadventures.⁵ Using the monsoons correctly, later travelers were able to venture much farther beyond the Persian Gulf and Arabia, although the Arabian frankincense trade ensured that Near Eastern ports remained important. The most complete Periplus text is the Periplus Maris Erythraei, preserved in a tenth-century codex (Codex Palatinus Graecus 398, fol. 40v–54v), written by an Egyptian Greek merchant from his personal experiences sailing out of the Red Sea at least as far as Rhapta (near Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania) and Cape Comorin, India.⁶ He meticulously reports the distances between stops, types of anchorage available at each stop, the local political situations, and what commodities can be acquired and offloaded. Much later, Marcianus of Heraclea (1.15–19) converted Ptolemy’s world map into a Periplus of the Outer Sea, supplying similar accounts of the Arabian and Persian Gulfs as the earlier Periploi authors, but within a global scheme (Schoff 1927: 6).

       The Roman Period

The imperial ambitions motivating geographical research begun under the Hellenistic rulers continued under Augustus after he had firmly established Roman dominance in the Near East, and M. Vipsanius Agrippa was the major authority, serving as governor in Syria and leading a number of campaigns there. He oversaw production of a world map at Rome in the Porticus Vipsania, still incomplete at his death in 12 BCE, and several accompanying commentaries (Dilke 1985: 41–42, 1987: 207–209; Nicolet 1991: 98ff; Pliny HN 3.17). Pliny the Elder quotes Agrippa at several points in his Natural History, generally referring to the commentaries, and in a few instances to the map itself. For example, the dimensions of Mesopotamia (800 miles long, 360 miles wide) come from the commentaries (HN 6.137), while the distance of Charax Spasinou (an old Hellenistic city located at the confluence of the Tigris and Eulaeus rivers⁷ ) to the Persian Gulf is obtained from the map “Agrippa’s portico” (HN 6.139; cf. Dilke 1985: 50). Around 1 BCE, preparatory to an expedition by Gaius Caesar, Juba of Mauretania and Isidorus of Charax were commissioned to prepare surveys of Parthia and Arabia, the results of which augmented Agrippa’s earlier information (Pliny HN 6.141).⁸ Isidorus’s description of Parthia contains hints that it was indeed intended for a military force, as with its reference to an army crossing the Euphrates at the confluence of the Khabur river north of Dura-Europos: Isidorus says (FGrH 781 F2 §1) “there the army crosses over to the Roman side,” i.e. from the east bank to the west (Millar 1998a: 120).

Juba was a historian, ethnographer, and client king of the Romans, and he concentrated his report On Arabia for Gaius Caesar on southern Mesopotamia, Arabia, and the coasts of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, now known through Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (FGrH 275, especially F1–3, 30–34). Isidorus’s report, Parthian Stations (Stathmoi Parthikoi), is possibly the summary of a longer description, the Guidebook of Parthia (Parthias Periēgētikon) (Schoff 1914: 17).⁹ It is preserved in the late thirteenth-century Codex Parisinus suppl. gr. 443 and Codex Parisinus gr. 571 (Diller 1952: 19–20, 30; 46–47¹⁰ ) and like the bematists’ writings it describes the route and stations for a west-to-east journey. Isidorus reveals СКАЧАТЬ