Pytheas

This article deals with the Greek geographer. For the moon crater see Pytheas (moon crater) .

Monument to Pytheas on the Marseille Stock Exchange

Pytheas of Massalia ( ancient Greek Πυθέας , Pythéas ; * around 380 BC ; † around 310 BC ) was a Greek trader, geographer and, as a navigator, one of the great discoverers of antiquity .

At the same time as Alexander the Great was advancing in the east to the limits of what was then known in Europe, Pytheas was exploring northwestern Europe . His travelogue, the title of which was probably Across the Ocean ( Περὶ τοῦ ᾿Ωκεανοῦ Perì toũ Okeanoũ ), has not survived . The few fragments of the book are known from quotes by other authors (including Strabo , Eratosthenes and Pliny the Elder ), who, however, sometimes called Pytheas liars because they considered his journeys to be impossible or because they themselves (like Polybius ) profile themselves as experts on the subject wanted to. Further references can be found in the works of ancient astronomers such as Hipparchus of Rhodes .

Life

Little more is known about Pytheas' personal background than that he came from the Phocean colony of Massalia (Latin: Massilia, today's Marseille ) and was a trader. It is also unclear whether he made just one or several trips to the north and how his life went on after his return. It is more or less certain, however, that the events around 320 BC. Played.

Pytheas' itinerary

Pytheas may have got through the Strait of Gibraltar . The adoption of a monopoly on tin by Carthage and a blockade of the strait to maintain the monopoly are doubtful. Corresponding assumptions that Pytheas' ship had slipped through a control system, therefore also. The passages in the text to support the blockade theory are poor and allow other interpretations. The necessary facilities to maintain a blockade fleet on the Strait of Gibraltar are not proven, and Pytheas' hometown of Massilia had a more tolerable trade route for tin with the Rhodanos itself.

It is also unclear whether Pytheas even circumnavigated the Iberian Peninsula , since the corresponding reference in Strabo - Pytheas traveled the coasts of Europe "from Gades to Tanais " - can also be understood metaphorically as "from one end of Europe to the other". The English archaeologist Barry Cunliffe even assumes that Pytheas did not travel with his own ship, but first reached the Gaulish Atlantic coast via Aude and Garonne and from there continued his voyage with local sailors in stages, including Strabon's remark that Pytheas had Britain " wandered through "- not circumnavigated - would fit.

His further journey must have taken him across the Loire estuary , the Armorica peninsula , Cape Belerion , which belongs to Cornwall , the Irish Sea and the North Channel to the Hebrides . This follows from the above quotations and latitude data from ancient astronomers, which are said to go back to Pytheas' measurements of the position of the sun and roughly correspond to the north coast of Brittany , the Isle of Man and the Hebridean island of Lewis .

Pytheas' observations

Some geographical and ethnographic remarks by Pytheas have also come down to us. For example, he observed the phenomenon of tides, unknown to the Greeks, and was the first to correctly associate it with the phases of the moon . In the British Isles he himself observed how tin was mined, smelted and forged into ingots, which were transported over a causeway to the island of Ictis , from where they were resold to foreign traders. According to the description and location of the prehistoric tin mines, Ictis could have been St. Michael's Mount or Mount Batten off the south coast of Cornwall.

From the sea, Pytheas measured the length of the coast of Albion and calculated 42,500  stadiums (about 7,800 kilometers). He also determined the distance from the northern tip of Scotland to the home port of Massalia with the help of the different shadow lengths of his sundial and came to 1,700 kilometers (actually: 1,815 km). From Scotland he sailed further north, noticing that the summer days were getting longer. Strabo doubts the distance information and shows several errors compared to the observations of Eratosthenes . Due to the false information given by Pytheas about already known areas, his travel reports would be implausible.

Thule and Abalus

The end point and further course of Pytheas' journey are in the dark. In Strabo there is a general remark about the countries "near the frost zone", whose inhabitants mixed water, yeast and honey to hydromeli ( mead ), fed on fruit and milk and threshed their grain in warehouses; Elsewhere, Pytheas 'most distant travel destination is Thule Island , said to be six days' drive north of Britain. Depending on whether the two quotations refer to the same place or whether the first comment is only of a general nature, Thule could be Iceland . Tacitus later assumed as another possibility that the Shetland Islands were meant.

However, there is no doubt that Pytheas went to the far north, because according to Solonius he came across the "sluggish and coagulated sea" (Latin: pigrum et concretum mare ) on a day's drive north of Thule and was the first Greek to observe drift ice . He also reports on the northern lights and the midnight sun , phenomena completely unknown in the Mediterranean. The scholars of that time and the centuries that followed suspected fiction behind accounts of phenomena like these, whereas today they can be easily explained. However, Pytheas' mention of a “sea lung ” ( pleumōn thalassios , in the Mediterranean the name of a jellyfish ), which has been interpreted as a metaphorical description of the “gelatinous” transition area between fog, water and drift ice, is unclear .

From Thule, Pytheas sailed in a southerly direction and reached an estuary called Metuonis , which stretched over 6,000  stadiums (approx. 1100 km) and was inhabited by the Guiones tribe. A day's drive away was the island of Abalon (or Abalus ), on whose beaches amber was washed up, which Pytheas was the first author to correctly describe as fossil tree resin. Various interpretations were put forward for Metuonis and Abalon , for example the Danish Sound (which Pytheas would have interpreted as the mouth of a river) with the large Danish islands or the Wadden Sea coast from West to North Frisia with Helgoland , which, however, was by no means "a day trip" for the possibilities at the time was away. It is also possible that Pytheas was not himself on the Jutian amber coast or in the Baltic Sea, but rather told stories about a mythical island of the dead (cf. the Celtic Avalon ), mixed with a possible function of Heligoland or a North Frisian island for the amber trade.

reception

The no longer preserved travel reports of Pytheas were judged differently by ancient authors. Pliny the Elder writes that Timaeus of Tauromenion (born around 345 BC) believed the story of Pytheas' discovery of amber to be credible. Strabo, on the other hand, quotes Dikaiarchos (died around 285 BC), who did not trust the stories of Pytheas.

The title of the book by Pytheas can be roughly from a mention in Geminus of Rhodes tap that his treatise on the ocean ( ocean calls () πεπραγματευμένα περὶ τοῦ ὠκεανοῦ ) and quotes from it. The Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen , who made comparisons with his own experiences, describes Pytheas as “brave and intelligent”.

Stichtenoth published the result of a comprehensive evaluation in 1959 as an attempt to reconstruct the work of Pytheas. He cited all texts in which Pytheas is mentioned by name, but pointed out that further passages would be found in ancient authors.

As an obsession with a character in a novel, Pytheas is a literary motif in Gustav Frenssen's Otto Babendiek (1926) . Arno Schmidt created a literary speculation about Pytheas' last, not handed down, stage of life and his death in 1949 with his story Gadir (probably conveyed through reading Frenssen). Raoul Schrott's novel Finis Terrae (1995) provides a literary form of Pytheas' life story . In Swedish, the subject was taken up by Alf Henrikson ( Pytheas resa till Thule , Avesta 1985).

The lunar crater Pytheas has been named after him since 1935.

Editions and translations

• Christina Horst Roseman (Ed.): Pytheas of Massalia, On the Ocean. Text, Translation and Commentary. Ares Publishers, Chicago 1994, ISBN 0-89005-545-9 .
• Dietrich Stichtenoth (ed.): Pytheas of Marseille. Across the ocean. Böhlau, Cologne / Graz 1959.

literature

• José María Camacho Rojo, Pedro Pablo Fuentes González: Pythéas de Marseille . In: Richard Goulet (Ed.): Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques , Volume 5, Part 2 (= V b), CNRS Éditions, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-271-07399-0 , pp. 1774-1780
• Barry Cunliffe: The extraordinary voyage of Pytheas the Greek . Allen Lane, London 2001 / Penguin, London 2002, ISBN 0-14-029784-7
• Dietrich Stichtenoth: Across the ocean. The fragments . Böhlau, Weimar / Cologne 1959.
• Pedro A Barceló: Carthage and the Iberian Peninsula before the Barkids . Habelt, Bonn 1988, ISBN 3-7749-2354-X
• Walter Ameling : Carthage · Studies on the military, state and society . CH Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37490-5
• Dieter Lelgemann : Where was Thule? - Geodetic data from ancient times . In: Journal for Geodesy, Geoinformation and Land Management , Issue 6/12, DVW eV (Ed.), Wißner-Verlag, Augsburg 2012, ISSN  1618-8950 , pp. 335–339
• Barry Cunliffe, Marie-Geneviève l 'Her: Pythéas le grec découvre l'Europe du Nord . éd. Autrement, Paris 2003, ISBN 2-7467-0361-0
• Hugues Journès, Yvon Georgelin et Jean-Marie Gassend: Pythéas, explorateur et astronome . Ed. de la Nerthe, Ollioules 2000, ISBN 2-913483-10-0
• Thibaud Guyon, Jeanine Rey et Philippe Brochard: Pythéas l'explorateur: De Massalia au cercle polar . Ed. École des loisirs, Paris 2001, ISBN 2-211-06251-2
• Jean Mabire: Thulé, le Soleil retrouvé des hyperboréens . Éditions Pardès, Puiseaux (Loiret) 1975, ISBN 2-86714-287-3

Web links

• Literature by and about Pytheas in the catalog of the German National Library
• On the trail of the Pytheas of Massalia
• TS Garlinghouse: On the Ocean. The Famous Voyage of Pytheas

Remarks

1. ↑ In his GEOGRAPHIE, Book I Chapter 4, (English translation) Strabo describes the report on Thule as a forgery
2. ↑ See Strabo in his GEOGRAPHIE, Book I Chapter 4 (English translation)
3. ↑ Editor's Note Bill Thayer to the English translation of the GEOGRAPHY of STRABON
4. ↑ Pliny, Naturalis historia , 37.11 .
5. ↑ Strabon Geographika 2,4,2 (paragraph 401).
6. ↑ Geminos, Introduction to Phenomena 6,9.
7. ^ Fridtjof Nansen: In Northern Mists. Translated by Arthur G. Chater. William Heinmann, London 1911, p. 2 .