Ancient history

Pytheas, the Greek navigator who reached the Arctic in the 4th century BC.

A few days ago we recounted in an article the voyage of the Carthaginian navigator Himilcón across the Atlantic, surrounding the Iberian Peninsula, traveling along the French coast and reaching the British Isles, probably to trade in tin. However, the most famous journey that we have news of following that same route is the one that was later carried out by the Phocian Pytheas , reaching considerably further than his predecessor and making important geographical and scientific discoveries; he also wrote a story -now lost- of his odyssey.

We know this narration thanks to extracts from later works by other authors, in the case of Strabo or Diodorus of Sicily , which in turn took them from other intermediates. The wise Gémino de Rhodes He is the one who provides the presumed original title of the work of Piteas, which would be something like On the ocean (or In the ocean u Ocean plain), although Apollonius of Rhodes changes it to Journey around the Earth .

In the 19th century, the hypothesis was spread that Pytheas actually recounted two trips in a single story , one to Great Britain and one to North-Eastern Europe; It is not currently accepted. As might be expected, the biographical data on Pytheas is not clear. It is believed that he was born around 350 BC in Massalia (current Marseille), a Greek colony, but everything that surrounds him is uncertain and controversial, as classical scholars argued about the likelihood of what he later told.

Pliny the Elder says that the Greek historian Timeus of Tauromenium , author of a chronicle of the Greeks of the western Mediterranean, did believe in his account. Instead, Dicearchus of Messina (a geographer who had been a student at the Athenian Aristotelian Lyceum) was rather skeptical and Strabo, along with Polybius and Artemidorus, accused him of having invented travel arguing that he could never have financed them - ignoring that the Phocaean merchants could do it and put him in charge - and that inaccuracies abound in his account, which is logical on the other hand because they often start from different positions.

The opinions of Timaeus and Dicerarchus are interesting because they are both contemporary with Pytheas and thus provide a clue as to the exact date of the trip, which would date between 330 and 300 BC The circumstances that prompted it are also not clear, taking into account the context:at that time the western Mediterranean was dominated by Carthage , which in the sixth century B.C. had signed an agreement with Rome to share areas of influence and he would renew it precisely in the year 348 B.C.

According to Polybius, by then the Carthaginians had occupied part of Sicily and Sardinia, until then Greek possessions, and therefore the control over the Strait of Gibraltar . This leads to the deduction that the Massaliots had a good relationship with them -probably thanks to a unilateral treaty- or they would never have been able to go out to the Atlantic. Other less likely theories they suggest that Pytheas may have crossed the strait at night or in a storm; There were even, especially in the 19th century, those who proposed that he had set sail from the mouth of some northern Gaul river (Loire, Garonne?).

In any case, Pytheas's little ship, combining sail power with oars, managed to get out into the ocean and sail north, making landfall in several places in Gaul. It is known that some, such as what is now Mont Saint-Michel, were tin producing centers , which may be a clue about the purpose of the voyage. It is endorsed by the fact that he later jumped to Pretanniká Nesiá , that is Britannia , name that he gave for the first time to that great island that also had places rich in this mineral, such as Cornwall.

It is unclear whether Pytheas circumnavigated Britain or only calculated the perimeter insular (forty thousand stadia, taking into account that Herodotus establishes the approximate equivalence of a stadia in almost two thousand meters), a calculation that Strabo criticized although Diodorus of Sicily gives a similar figure (perhaps taken from Piteas himself); In any case, since the story of the focense has been lost, there is only data from later reviews and that is always inaccurate. It does seem that he did not limit himself to traveling along the coast by sea and explored inland , describing it as cold and subject to frost, and interacting with its inhabitants, whom he describes as simple but divided into many kingdoms and adds that they fight in chariots.

Pytheas divides Britain into three coordinates:Kantion (probably the extreme southeast), Belerion (the southwest) and Orkas (the Orkney archipelago, north of Scotland). Of these, he was especially interested in Belerion because Cornwall is located there. , an important extraction and marketing center for tin and whose inhabitants are described as more civilized, probably because of their commercial dealings with foreign visitors. Strabo also does not believe that Pytheas reached theArctic , as Polybius cites, and he believes it was only the British North; maybe the Shetland Islands or theHebrides , considering that he says that he was six days' sail from northern Britannia; maybe it was Trondheim (Norway), more or less at the same latitude.

This makes us suspect that he did not actually circumnavigate Great Britain but instead headed southeast, it is true that there are other candidates for that mysterious island :the Faroes? Iceland? In favor of the latter is his allusion to the "always bright fire" , which some interpret as the midnight sun and others as the volcanoes that abound there. There is no shortage of people who add Greenland to the list. Whatever the truth, the name given to the place is Thule .

De Thule, wherever he was, tells what its inhabitants were like :Farmers who gathered herbs, fruits, and roots, stored grain, and drank mead (all of which would eliminate Iceland from the list, since the archaeological record tells us it was deserted until the 9th century).

He also points out that on the ship they came across ice floes and they saw that the coast ceased to be such to become a mixture of land, water and air (in reference to the fog) that he calls pleumón thalattios or marine lung , the same term that the Greeks used to refer to jellyfish, due to the similarity of the floating ice blocks with them. She then reached the waters of Scythia, which today is rather believed to have been the Baltic Sea at the height of Germany and Denmark because he landed and met the Gutons, a Germanic people that today we call Goth .

Apparently, the interest of the Greek there was to obtain amber from the islands of Heligoland, Zeeland and surroundings, sites historically rich in this product. The incredible journey continued east to the mouth of the Vistula , trading with the Aesti of present-day Estonia and reaching the Don River .

As we said before, some nineteenth-century authors believed that Piteas would have returned to Massalia after visiting Great Britain and this Baltic crossing would correspond more to a second journey; again there are no certainties. The fact is that this fantastic odyssey lasted a year in total and traveled more than twelve thousand kilometers , a journey comparable to that of Columbus' first voyage.

During that time, Piteas collected and left us valuable scientific information:he discovered the peninsular nature of Iberia and was the first to call it Hispania , he quite accurately calculated the location of the North Pole as well as the latitude of Massalia with a minimum centesimal error, leaving indicators so that later the parallels could be drawn.; he was also right in establishing the relationship of the phases of the moon with the tides, he first witnessed for a southern midnight sun and the northern lights , and the geographical data collected on northern Europe they were in force for many centuries in authors such as Eratosthenes, Hipparchus or Posidonius, among others.