A traveler's tale

Pytheas of Massalia was a Greek polymath who was born in what is now Marseilles, France in around 350 B.C.E., making him a generation younger than Aristotle, and an almost exact contemporary of Alexander the Great.  When I tell you about what this guy did, you will (I hope) be shocked that his name isn't as familiar to students of history as the other two gentlemen I mentioned.

The reason for his relative obscurity is one that is all too common; he is known to have written a single book, Τὰ Περὶ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ (On the Ocean), possibly supplemented by a second work, Περίοδος Γῆς (Around the Earth), although some scholars believe those were two alternate titles for the same account.  In any case, nothing of his writing survives except for excerpts and references to him and his accomplishments in other writing, most notably in the books of such luminaries as Strabo and Pliny the Elder.  Sadly, like so much of the brilliant work of antiquity, all the copies of Pytheas's book (or books) have fallen prey to the ravages of time.

What Pytheas of Massalia recorded in his writings would have been an incredible feat for anyone, and nearly beggars belief for someone in the fourth century B.C.E.  He'd heard that there were these islands off the northwest coast of Gaul, inhabited by some curious folks called the Celts, and he decided to go see for himself.

How he started his travels is uncertain.  At this point in history, the Carthaginians had control of the Straits of Gibraltar, and the hostilities between them and damn near everyone else in the region would have made passage a dicey affair.  There's a possibility that he crossed Gaul overland and launched from the mouth of either the Garonne or Loire River into the Bay of Biscay.  In any case, once he got into the Atlantic, it was off to the races.

He sailed up the west coast of England, stopping to do considerable travel on foot, up through the Irish Sea, past the Isle of Man and the Hebrides.  He is the first to note that the natives called the main island Prydain -- Romanized to Britannia -- which is where we get the modern name Britain.

Then, amazingly, Pytheas kept going.

Marble sculpture of Pytheas by Auguste Ottin (1860)  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rvalette, Pythéas, CC BY-SA 3.0]

There are credible claims that he made it as far as either Iceland or the Lofoten Islands -- which it was is uncertain.  He reports being in a place "six days north of Britain," an island of "perpetual frost and snow" where, nevertheless, "the Sun never sets" -- the first known Greek to realize what happens to day length when you're above the Arctic Circle.  Not content even yet, he began to head east, making his way into the Baltic Sea.  There, he met a people he called the Gutones (almost certainly the Goths), who made their living trading amber, which is abundant in what is now Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.  From there he went inland, possibly traveling along the region's many navigable rivers.  It's thought that he made it all the way to what was then called Scythia, along the north shore of the Black Sea.

One of the most remarkable things about Pytheas and the others who traveled with him is how well received they were.  Despite the reputation for hostility that the ancient Celts, Norse, Teutons, Baltics, and Scythians all had, there's no indication Pytheas ever had any trouble -- just showing that for the most part, if you treat people with kindness and respect, they reciprocate.  Even the "barbarians."

Pytheas also had a couple of striking scientific achievements -- using the changing elevation above the horizon of familiar stars as he went north, he tried to estimate the circumference of the Earth using a sextant.  His measurements were off -- Eratosthenes of Cyrene did way better a hundred years later -- but still, it was a creditable attempt.  Second, he is the first person known to have associated the tides with the position and phases of the Moon, a remarkable idea during a time when the celestial objects were supposed to be gods of various sorts, and there was no inkling of a law of gravitation.

Finally, Pytheas made his way back home to write his book(s), and lived the rest of his life in comfort in his villa in Massalia.  But can you imagine what he must have seen and experienced?  Meeting the people of the British Isles, Scandinavia, Germany, the Baltic lands, and Scythia before they'd had much chance to contact people from other cultures.  Seeing the enormous expanse of the oceans and the pack ice of the Arctic from the deck of a simple sailing ship.  What an adventure -- and what extraordinary curiosity, drive, and courage.

It's such a tragedy that Pytheas's original manuscript(s) have been lost; imagine what more we could learn from his voyages by reading a first-hand account.  Regardless, he was an extraordinary person, someone determined to see as much of the world as he could, and who amazingly (considering the times) lived to tell his traveler's tale to the astonishment of his friends back home.

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Cups and scrolls

I recently finished the outstanding novel The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, which tells the story of the events of The Iliad, focusing on the doomed love affair between Achilles and Patroclus (it's told from Patroclus's point of view).  The best novelizations of history and historical fiction -- other examples that come to mind are Robert Graves's I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Sigrid Undset's Kristen Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken, and Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven -- don't just tell a story but actually transport you back into a different time and place.  They succeed at portraying the underlying humanity we share with all people, however far back you go, while communicating the fascinating otherness we experience when immersed in a different culture.

It's this same curiosity about other times and places that explains why I'm fascinated with archaeology.  The idea of seeing, or even touching, an item that was handled by people hundreds or thousands of years ago is an absolute thrill.  This is why I was so excited to read two wonderful pieces of research sent my way by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

The first one is why I started this post with The Song of Achilles, because it's a study of an artifact called Nestor's Cup, a 2,800 ceramic vessel with the inscription, "I am Nestor's Cup, good to drink from.  Whoever drinks this cup empty, straightaway the desire for beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will seize him."

As an aside, I'm not sure that getting the hots for Aphrodite would, in the long run, be a good thing.  In The Iliad and The Odyssey the gods mostly come across as petulant, willful, and perpetually horny teenagers, and mortals were generally better off avoiding getting noticed by them.  As far as Nestor himself, he's over and over called "a great and wise counselor," but if you know the story, this comes across as a little weird because Nestor is the one who convinced Agamemnon to take the Achaeans into battle (with disastrous results), and was also the one who gave Patroclus the advice that ended up getting him killed.

So if Nestor handed me a cup and said, "Hey, drink this and Aphrodite will be ready to hop in bed with you!" I doubt I'd be all that inclined to take him up on it.

Be that as it may, the artifact itself is fascinating.  It was found in a burial site in Pithekoussai, a Greek colony on the island of Ischia (currently owned by Italy).  It may have originally been used as a drinking vessel, as per the inscription, but in the eighth century B.C.E. it was buried along with the ashes of three adults, and various other fancy and expensive items.

"Our research rewrites the history and the previous archaeological interpretation of the tomb, throwing new light on funeral practices, culture and society of the Greek immigrants in the ancient West Mediterranean," said study co-author Melania Gigante.  "Pithekoussai is widely considered one of the most important archaeological findings of pre-classical Mediterranean archaeology."

The other story comes from an even more famous site -- Herculaneum, which along with Pompeii was destroyed by a catastrophic pyroclastic flow from Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E.  Wealthy communities like Pompeii and Herculaneum were mostly inhabited by the Roman upper crust, who were well-read and owned extensive libraries.

Unfortunately, Roman books and scrolls -- being made of parchment or paper -- would have been incinerated during the eruption, as the material in pyroclastic flows can easily reach a temperature of 1,000 C.  However, the temperatures rose (and then dropped) so fast, and the remains then blanketed by ash, that the scrolls in the libraries weren't burned to cinders but instead were carbonized in situ, where they were found, still rolled up, when the ruins were excavated.

The problem is that these blackened cylinders are exceptionally fragile.  Unrolling them would immediately cause them to crumble into tiny fragments.  So while there might be traces of the ink left behind, how could you ever open them up to see it?

It was impossible... until now.

Using a non-invasive laser imager and a complex machine-learning algorithm, archaeologist Luke Farritor of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has succeeded in discerning a single word -- πορϕυρας, meaning "purple" -- in a proof-of-concept that gives antiquarians hope of reading at least some of Herculaneum's damaged scrolls.

The most exciting part is that the majority of the documents we have from the Greeks and Romans are copies of copies of copies that finally made their way into medieval libraries.  The inevitable errors (not to mention deliberate editing) from this kind of literary Game of Telephone mean that we really have no idea how close our versions are to the originals.  If we could read the scrolls of Herculaneum, this would bring us one step closer to seeing what the ancients actually wrote, as well as opening up the thrilling possibility of recovering works that were thought to be lost forever.

So that's the news from the world of antiquity.  My thanks to the eagle-eyed reader who sent me the links.  Now I think I'll sit and drink my coffee (from an ordinary, non-Aphrodite-summoning mug) and ponder what it was like to live thousands of years ago, and see -- at least faintly -- through the eyes of the ancients.

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