of modern Pakistan to its mouth, and to have come to the
area of the Suez.
In the second half of the fourth century b.c.e., Alexander
the Great’s invasion and conquest of Persia ended in a march
of discovery from the area of modern Syria and Turkey,
through what is now Iraq and Iran, bringing him to Bactria,
Sogdiana, Samarqand, and ultimately to the Indus River and
the ends of the Punjab in India. At this point his Macedonian
army, who had walked thousands of miles and fought many
battles, refused to go further, and Alexander took them on a
forced march back west, which entailed a grim passage of the
Gedrosia Desert.
At the end of the fourth century b.c.e. the Greek explorer
and navigator Pytheas of Massilia (modern-day Marseille)
wrote About the Ocean, which recounts his journey west and
north, from Gades (present-day Cádiz) in southern Spain,
up the Spanish coast, past the mouth of the Loire river (near
modern-day Nantes), and to the Cassiterides (the “Tin Isles,”
the modern British Isles), and particularly to Belerium (mod-
ern Cornwall), an important center for trading tin. Copper
and tin made bronze, and of the two elemental metals tin
was much rarer in the Mediterranean world. Pytheas is be-
lieved to have circumnavigated Britain and recorded other
lands that scholars have tentatively identifi ed as Norway, the
Vistula River (in modern-day Poland), and an island in the
North Sea that may have been Helgoland, which Pytheas re-
ported as being rich in amber.
Euhemerus of Messene, also from the late fourth century
b.c.e., was a famous author of the literature of exploration.
Euhemerus served under the Macedonian Cassander, who
ruled in European Greece aft er the death of Alexander the
Great in 323 b.c.e. Euhemerus’s account of a voyage to islands
of the Indian Ocean, including perhaps Sri Lanka, was popu-
lar and widely quoted by later authors, such as fi rst century
b.c.e. historian Diodorus Siculus. Although the writings of
Euhemerus are based on real knowledge of Indian islands
that may refl ect the work of more authentic explorers, they
are regarded as entirely fi ctional.
Because Alexander’s conquests left Macedonians in
charge of pieces of the former Persian Empire, which stretched
from the Aegean to India, knowledge of the eastern parts of
the world became much more readily available to the Greeks.
Alexander had left Sibyrtius as governor of Gedrosia, in the
east of his conquered territory, and Sibyrtius sent one Meg-
asthenes as an ambassador to India. Megasthenes met with
Candragupta (r. ca. 321–ca. 297 b.c.e.), founder of the Mau-
rya Empire in northern India, and returned to write of his
travels in a work entitled Indika.
Even under the Romans, many of the fundamental works
of geography and books about exploration that provided geo-
graphical data were written in Greek by Greeks. For example,
the Greek historian Polybius, who served with the Roman
general Scipio during the Second Punic War in the second
century b.c.e., accompanied Scipio on an exploratory voy-
age into the Atlantic Ocean. Also during the second century
b.c.e. the historian and geographer Agatharchides of Cnidus
wrote of his voyage around the Red Sea, with descriptions of
Arabia and Ethiopia. Th e historians Diodorus Siculus and
Aelianus as well as the geographer Strabo, all of whom lived
in Rome and wrote in Greek, relied heavily on Agatharchides’
work for their own.
Ptolemy (also known as Claudius Ptolemaeus), consid-
ered one of the greatest ancient geographers, lived during the
second century c.e. His treatises cover mathematics and as-
tronomy, but he is most famous for his massive Geography,
the fi rst work to use latitude and longitude to identify the lo-
cations of places. For his description of lands to the east, Ptol-
emy relied heavily on Marinus of Tyre, about whom little is
known except that he wrote during the fi rst century c.e. and
that he provided a cultural and geographical description of
the “Seres,” the ancient Greek term for the Chinese. Ptolemy
also mentions a certain businessman from Damascus named
Maes or Titianus, who claimed to know overland routes for
travel to China, thus perhaps anticipating Marco Polo by over
a thousand years. Ironically, the most signifi cant error in
Ptolemy’s Geography can tell us much about ancient explora-
tion. His maps show a large landmass connecting southern
Africa to China, depicting the India Ocean as an enclosed
sea. In a work as thoroughly researched as his, Ptolemy’s er-
ror is convincing proof that no ancient Greek or Roman by
the second century c.e. had circumnavigated Africa.ROME
BY DUANE W. ROLLER
Th e Romans had no sense of exploration for its own merits;
the Latin word exploratio refers to a military reconnaissance.
But since the Roman world expanded over vast territories and
since there were trade and commercial contacts throughout
much of the Eastern Hemisphere, almost by accident the Ro-
mans were able to explore large regions, though inevitability
as a by-product of political or mercantile interests.
In their early years the Romans made no addition to
geographical knowledge. Th eir expansion from the fourth
into the fi rst century b.c.e. throughout Italy, into the western
Mediterranean region, and eventually into the Greek world
did not reach any areas previously unknown to Mediterra-
nean cultures. Roman exploration actually began with their
destruction of Carthage in 146 b.c.e. At this time the Romans
acquired the cultural heritage of their defeated enemy and
learned about a wide range of Carthaginian exploration into
areas previously unknown to the Romans: down the west
coast of Africa (and perhaps around the continent), into sub-
Saharan Africa, and along the Atlantic coasts as far as the
British islands.
Roman curiosity led Scipio Aemilianus (ca. 185–129
b.c.e.), the conqueror of Carthage, to commission his adviser,
the historian Polybius (ca. 200–118 b.c.e.), to investigate.
Polybius made a number of trips, going down the West Afri-
can coast as far as the tropics and across France to its north-exploration: Rome 443