News from the East? Roman-Age Geographers and the Pontus Euxinus*

CHAPTER 15 News from the East? Roman-Age Geographers and the Pontus Euxinus*

Eckart Olshausen

1 The Issue

The enormous territorial gains—partly by conquest, partly by bequest— which moved the boundaries of the late republican and early imperial Roman Empire to distant parts of the world, among others to the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea)—raise the question whether the impact of this dramatic develop- ment caused a significant change of the ways in which the Pontus Euxinus was viewed from a geopolitical as well as a geographical perspective.1

1.1 ‘Pre-Roman’ Knowledge about the Pontus Euxinus The Greeks had at that point known of the Pontus Euxinus for a long time and become familiar with it.2 At the time of the great Greek colonization3 they acquired profound knowledge of it as they set up numerous settlements along its shores. In the beginning the practical matter of exploring the sea lanes took precedence, which may have resulted in naval manuals, whose literary remainders are, however, mostly no more than fragmentary bits and pieces of periploi.4

* I am grateful to Dieter Prankel who translated the text and to Richard Szydlak who composed the map. 1 Nota bene: The focus is exclusively on the geographers’ knowledge of the Pontus Euxinus, not on the level of information about it in the Roman world in general. 2 For a comprehensive treatment of the topic cf. Rausch 2013. 3 Cf. Wittke, Olshausen, and Szydlak 2007, 68f., including sources and literature. 4 Cf. e.g. Ps.Scylax, the anonymous author of a periplus of the three continents Europe, Asia and Africa (4th cent. BC), who wrote under the assumed name of the famous seafarer from the court of the Persian King Dareios I (522–486). His right-to-left description of the coast of the Pontus Euxinus bridges the Tanaïs (Don), the borderline between Europe and Asia (67– 91). Cf. also Ps.Scymnos, the anonymos author of a fragmentarily preserved iambic perie- gesis dedicated to King Nicomedes (probably Nicomedes II Epiphanes, 149–128). It also circles the Pontus Euxinus, setting off from a place called Philia (722f.) to the polis of Thynias on the island of Apollonia (1025f.), proceding to the left.

Aristotle (384–322) then theorized about the Pontus Euxinus and the prop- erties of its currents.5 Eratosthenes in his Geographika likened it to a Scythian bow—an image that gained wide currency.6 Hellenistic mythographers were fascinated by the Pontus Euxinus. The epic narrative by Apollonius Rhodius (3rd cent. BC) about the expedition of the Argonauts7 has been preserved. As a librarian at Alexandria and as such a pre- decessor to Eratosthenes, he traced a route that crosses the Pontus Euxinus from the Thracian Bosphorus to the river Phasis (today Rioni) and then turns back to the mouth of the Istros (Danube) via that of the Halys (Kızılırmak).8 There can be no doubt that the Argonautic myth is older than the Homeric narratives. Nevertheless, the geographical knowledge at Apollonius’ disposal was definitely more up to date, in spite of the fact that Alexander’s expedition bypassed the Pontus Euxinus, thus perpetuating traditional misconceptions instead of correcting them.9 The historian Polybius (2nd cent. BC) used periploi and scientific sources in his Roman History to expound the historical and geographical circumstances of the trade war waged by Byzantium against Rhodes in 200 BC.10 Although he wrote his history in the Greek language it seems to have generated much inter- est in Rome. It was then at the latest that the Roman senatorial class acquired some knowledge about the Pontus Euxinus—unless some literate Romans had already gleaned some information from the works of Herodotus11 and espe- cially Xenophon12 beforehand.

1.2 The Roman Senate and the Pontus Euxinus Long before Nicomedes IV died (74 BC), bequeathing his Bithynian kingdom to Rome, and long before Pompey installed the twin provinces of Bithynia et Pontus as part of his reorganization of the Near East (63 BC) thereby moving

5 Arist., Mete. 2.1.354a. 6 Cf. Geus 2002, 282f. 7 Cf. Kubitschek 1933. 8 Ap. Rhod. 4.236–328. Cf. also Meyer 1998, and the Argonautica by Valerius Flaccus largely beholden to Apollonius. 9 Cf. e.g. the connection between the Istros and the Adriatic Sea, Ap. Rhod. 4.284–493. 10 Polyb. 4.39–43. For the Pontus Euxinus, he may have used Strato of Lampsacus as his source to whom he refers critically in 12.25c. In that very report he rebukes the use of tales by merchants, seafarers and poets, while using their information in the same context. 11 About the western and northern tributaries to the Pontus Euxinus (4.47–58) as well as the sea itself (4.85f.). 12 On the routes from Trapezus to Harmene (Xen., An. 4.7.21–6.1.14) and from there across the Tracian Bosphorus to Salmydessos (Xen., An. 6.2.1–7.7.57).