interlopers by conjuring up monsters, freaks, evildoers, bad weather, impas-
sable geographical features, and other creative devices. Sometimes this
worked, and sometimes it didn’t. When the Roman naturalist Pliny the
Elder was told a fantastic story about the source of cinnamon, he sneered:
“these tales have been invented by natives to raise the price of their com-
modities,”and he was right. Nevertheless, Pliny’s work–like that of other
ancient writers–contains its fair share of humbuggery. Once in writing,
inaccurate information could be copied from book to book, often over a
period of centuries, until it was considered to be fact.
Probably the best known traveler of the ancient Mediterranean world was
Herodotus, the only literary source of any importance for the classical Greek
period as, for the most part, the Greeks didn’t consider commerce as worthy
of writing about. For Herodotus and other writers it was all a matter of
choosing good informants or, too often, using whoever was available.
Herodotus made sincere if not always successful attempts to obtain good
information and frequently advises his readers“this is what I’ve been told
about such-and-such by so-and-so,”with the implication that you can take it
or leave it.
Herodotus was more than just a traveler. Much of the information in his
work came from other sources, which qualifies him in part as a second type
of narrative author, the scholar. The most useful writers of the Roman period
often traveled quite a bit, but essentially they were scholars. A good example
is the Greek author Strabo, whose life straddled thefirst centuriesBCEand
CE. He journeyed around the eastern Mediterranean gathering information in
many places, including Rome and Alexandria, the latter containing the
world’s most complete library. The result was theGeography, the best of all
ancient geographical accounts providing information on the world as known
by the educated classes of the Roman Empire. Strabo used many sources, and
it is through him and a few others that parts of lost works have survived.
Sometimes earlier sources were used indirectly through an intermediary as
in the case of Strabo borrowing from Artemidorus (now lost), who in turn
borrowed from a second centuryBCEwriter named Agatharchides. He wrote
three works, a history of Europe and a history of Asia, both of which are lost,
and a book on the Erythreaean Sea (the Red Sea and western side of the
Indian Ocean), which a modern scholar, Stanley M. Burstein, has cleverly
reconstructed in part by putting fragments of it together from three later
sources, including Strabo. Agatharchides got much of his information from
reports made by official missions of exploration and trade sent out by
Alexander the Great and the kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, which
Agatharchides had access to because he was an assistant to a counselor of one
of the Ptolemaic kings.
Strabo’s work, so crucial to our understanding of the ancient world, is
fortunate to have survived intact given that an enormous proportion of what
was written did not. Complementing (and sometimes contradicting) Strabo
10 Some introductory musings