Everything about Pytheas totally explained
Pytheas (Πυθέας), ca.
380 – ca.
310 BC) was a
Greek merchant,
geographer and
explorer from the
Greek colony
Massilia (today
Marseille, France). He made a voyage of exploration to northwestern
Europe around
325 BC. He may have travelled around a considerable part of
Great Britain, circumnavigating it between 330 and 320 BC. Pytheas is the first person on record to describe the
Midnight Sun, the
aurora and
polar ice, the first to mention the name
Britannia and
Germanic tribes and the one who introduced the idea of distant "
Thule" to the geographic imagination. He may have been the first Mediterranean observer to distinguish between the Germanic and Celtic "barbarian" peoples of northern and western Europe.
Voyage
Pytheas described his travels in a
periplus titled
On the Ocean (Περὶ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ). It hasn't survived; only excerpts remain, quoted or paraphrased by later authors, most familiarly in
Strabo and
Pliny's Natural History, who never saw Pytheas' text at firsthand. Some of them,
Polybius and Strabo, accused Pytheas of documenting a fictitious journey he could never have funded. His story is, however, geographically plausible. Pytheas estimated the circumference of
Great Britain within 2.5% of modern estimates, and determined
latitude by the length of the shadow of the upright index of a
sundial. He also understood the relationships between tides and phases of the Moon. In northern
Spain, he studied the
tides, and may have discovered that they're caused by the
Moon. This discovery was known to
Posidonius.
Pytheas wasn't the first Mediterranean mariner to sail up into the
North Sea territories and around Great Britain. Trade between
Gaul and Great Britain was routine; fishermen and others would travel to
Orkney,
Norway or
Shetland. The Roman
Avienus writing in the 4th century mentions an early Greek voyage, possibly from the 6th century BC. A recent conjectural reconstruction of the journey Pytheas documented has him traveling from
Marseille in succession to
Bordeaux,
Nantes,
Land's End,
Plymouth, the
Isle of Man,
Outer Hebrides, Orkney,
Iceland, Great Britain's east coast,
Kent,
Helgoland, returning finally to Marseille.
The start of Pytheas's voyage is unknown. The
Carthaginians supposedly had closed the
Strait of Gibraltar to all ships from other nations. Some historians therefore believe that he travelled overland to the mouth of the
Loire or the
Garonne. Others believe that, to avoid the Carthaginian blockade, he may have stuck close to land and sailed only at night. It is also possible he took advantage of a temporary lapse in the blockade, known to have taken place around the time he travelled.
Cornwall was important because it was the main source of
tin. Pytheas studied the production and processing of tin there. During his circumnavigation of Great Britain, he found that tides rose very high there. He recorded the local name of the islands in Greek as
Prettanike, which
Diodorus later rendered
Pretannia. This supports theories that the coastal inhabitants of
Cornwall may have called themselves
Pretani or
Priteni, 'Painted' or 'Tattooed' people, a term Romans Latinised as
Picti (
Picts). He is quoted as referring to the
British Isles as the "Isles of the Pretani."
Pytheas visited an island six days sailing north of Great Britain, called
Thule. It has been suggested that Thule may refer to
Iceland or
Greenland but parts of the
Norwegian coast,
Shetland and
Faroe Islands have also been suggested by historians. Pytheas says Thule was an agricultural country that produced
honey. Its inhabitants ate fruits and drank
milk, and made a drink out of
grain and honey. Unlike the people from Southern Europe, they'd
barns, and threshed their grain there rather than outside.
He said he was shown the place where the sun went to sleep, and he noted that the night in Thule was only two to three hours. One day further north the "congealed" sea began, he claimed. As Strabo says (as quoted in Chevallier 1984):
» Pytheas also speaks 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's 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" (which caused much discussion in the past) actually means
jellyfish, and modern scientists believe that Pytheas here tried to describe the formation of
pancake ice at the edge of the
drift ice, where sea, slush, and ice mix, surrounded by
fog. Besides its texture, the appearance
(External Link
) of pancake ice is perhaps reminiscent of a group of jellyfish. Alternatively - it isn't clear how precisely "those places" are related to the "waters around Thule" - the description would fit with the
Wadden Sea, a phenomenon Pytheas subsequently encountered and which also must have been entirely new to him.
After completing his survey of Great Britain, Pytheas travelled to the shallows on the continental
North Sea coast. He may also have visited an island which was a source of
amber or
ambergris. According to "
The Natural History" by
Pliny the Elder:
» Pytheas says that the Gutones, a people of Germany, inhabit the shores of an estuary of the Ocean called Mentonomon, their territory extending a distance of six thousand stadia; that, at one day's sail from this territory, is the Isle of Abalus, upon the shores of which, amber is thrown up by the waves in spring, it being an excretion of the sea in a concrete form; as, also, that the inhabitants use this amber by way of fuel, and sell it to their neighbours, the Teutones.
The island could have been
Helgoland,
Zealand in the
Baltic Sea or even the shores of
Bay of Gdansk,
Sambia and or
Curonian Lagoon which were historically the richest sources of
amber in the North Europe (Pliny's Gutones might have been Germanic
Goths or Balt
Galindians).
Pytheas may have returned the way he came; or by land, following the
Rhine and
Rhône rivers.
Literary influence
It is clear that Pytheas' own writing,
On the Ocean (Περί του Ωκεανού), which hasn't survived, was a central source of information to later periods, and possibly the only source. The astronomical author
Geminus of Rhodes mentions a "Description of the Ocean".
Marcianus, the scholiast on
Apollonius of Rhodes, mentions a
periodos gēs (περίοδος γῆς - a trip around the earth) or
periplus (περίπλους - a sail around). As is common with ancient texts, multiple titles may represent a single source, for example, if a title refers to a section rather than the whole. Whether one or many, none of Pytheas' own writings remain, and extant accounts of his voyage are primarily contained in Strabo,
Diodorus of Sicily and
Pliny the Elder. Pytheas is also a key figure in Charles Olson's
Maximus Poems.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Pytheas'.
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