Voyage to the North

Pytheas of Massalia · 325 BCE · Earth

Voyage to the North — Pytheas of Massalia · 325 BCE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Sail into the Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules to Britain and the far north; his purpose is not recorded, though the tin of the north may have been one aim.

Historical context

In the fourth century BCE the Greeks knew Britain and the northern Ocean only vaguely, perhaps through the Phoenicians, as Bunbury and Beazley put it in 1911. Pytheas of Massalia, an astronomer as well as a traveller, went north and wrote On the Ocean. Polybius, who read it, called it fiction; only quotations survive, in Strabo, Pliny, Diodorus and others.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Out of Massalia

    325 BCE

    Pytheas, a Greek of Massalia, sets out for the northern Ocean, a voyage he later describes in a book now lost.

  2. Past Iberia

    325 BCE

    Pytheas’s route into the Ocean is uncertain; Gades and the Sacred Cape, the south-western tip of Iberia, are among the places Eratosthenes took from his account.

  3. Britain measured

    325 BCE

    Pytheas reports travelling over Britain and gives its coast as more than 40,000 stades; from Belerion, its south-western cape, tin passes through merchants’ hands to Gaul.

  4. The land of Thule

    325 BCE

    He tells of Thule, six days’ sail north of Britain near a frozen sea, where, he said, the sun does not set at midsummer, and says that on his return he visited the whole coast of Europe from Gades to the Tanais.

Outcome

Reported Britain, its circuit and its tin coast, the tides, a far northern land called Thule near a frozen sea, and an amber island; his book is lost, and Polybius and Strabo called it fiction.

Pytheas of Massalia

Greek astronomer and traveller who sailed into the northern Ocean, described Britain and reported a far northern land he called Thule.

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