Arabian-Indian route at least down to Cape Comorin at the southern tip of India. He
probably spent some time in India: Indian names and words are transcribed accurately
into Greek. He may have been a merchant who decided to write a handbook for traders
between Roman Egypt and eastern Africa, southern Arabia and India, unlike the trad-
itional periploi, primarily guides for seamen. The author concentrates on trading routes,
ports and products, and indicates local friendliness or hostility. The PME provides informa-
tion on the rank and sometimes the name of the local ruler of each port and specifies goods
which can be sold to the ruler and his court. The text also alludes to historical events and
includes anthropological and natural historical information: description of the tides along
India’s north-western coast, unusual animals, distinctive appearance of locals, their dwell-
ings, language, eating habits and dress. As he was a businessman and not a scholar, the
author’s language is mainly functional and technical. Unlike E, M
T, and P, who relied on second hand information, the writer of the PME
is the only author with personal acquaintance of the Indian Ocean whose work has
survived.
Ed.: GGM 1.257–305; G.W.B. Huntingford, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1980); Casson (1989).
Daniela Dueck
Periplus Ponti Euxini (575 – 600 CE)
Collection of sailing instructions for the Black Sea by an unknown author. The text, con-
taining much information on coast-lines, harbors, rivers and cities, begins at the Thrakian
Bosporos, working counter-clockwise from Bithunia to Paphlagonia, Pontos, the Caucasus
and the Tauric Khersone ̄sos to Thrake ̄. Sources include A’ Periplus Ponti Euxini,
M P’s Periplous te ̄s entos thalasse ̄s and minor treatises (including
-S). More than 40 references to “current” (nun) cities and people, to Alans
and Goths, and to the Turkish invasion of the Crimea in 576, suggest a date of not earlier
than the last quarter of the 6th c.
Ed.: GGM 1.402–423; Diller (1952) 118–138.
Diller (1952) 102–146; HLB 1.528; ODB 1629, A. Kazhdan.
Andreas Kuelzer
Perseus (250 – 50 BCE?)
According to P (In primum Euclidis Elementorum librum pp. 111–112, 356 Fr.), Perseus
investigated the properties of curves generated by the intersection of a plane with the
surface of a torus (the solid of revolution of a circle about a straight line not passing through
the circle’s center). Proklos quotes an epigram by Perseus, indicating that he distinguished
five cases of intersection and three kinds of curve. By analogy with the Greek study of conic
sections, Perseus is likely to have demonstrated a sumptoma or characteristic property of each
curve. His work clearly belongs to the tradition of Hellenistic geometry; if, as generally
supposed, Proklos derived his information from a lost work of G, Perseus lived
before the middle of the 1st c. BCE.
DSB 10.529–530, I. Bulmer-Thomas; Knorr (1986) 267–272.
Alexander Jones
PERIPLUS PONTI EUXINI