First published June 1, 2021.
Pytheas of Massalia was a Greek geographer, astronomer and explorer from the colony of Massalia, today's Marseille in France. Around 325 BC he sailed out of the Mediterranean and north along the Atlantic coast to Britain, and he reported a land called Thule six days' sail beyond it, near a frozen sea. He is the first Mediterranean traveller on record to have reached the British Isles, and his lost book gave the Greek world its first eyewitness picture of the far north.
Left: a statue of Pytheas in Marseille (photo: Rvalette, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0). Right: a 1490 Italian version of Ptolemy's map of the British Isles, which may draw ultimately on measurements first made by Pytheas (Wikimedia Commons, public domain).
Almost everything we know about him comes second-hand, through writers who quoted, summarised or mocked him. That makes his story a good example of how historians piece together a journey from fragments, and why some of his most famous claims are still argued over.
Who was Pytheas?
Massalia was founded by Greeks from Phocaea, in Asia Minor, around 600 BC, and grew into a rich trading city at the mouth of the Rhône. Its merchants knew that tin, amber and other northern goods reached the Mediterranean through long chains of middlemen. Few Greeks, if any, had seen where those goods came from.
Pytheas probably lived around 350 to 300 BC. The voyage is usually dated to about 325 BC, during or just after the lifetime of Alexander the Great. The clue is that Aristotle does not mention him, but Aristotle's pupil Dicaearchus does. Older summaries sometimes place him in the third century BC; most scholars now prefer the late fourth.
He was more than an adventurer. Before he left, he measured the height of the noon sun at Massalia on the summer solstice using a gnomon, a simple vertical rod whose shadow gives the sun's angle. That gave him the city's latitude with remarkable accuracy, and he went on taking similar readings in the north.
The route north
How Pytheas got out of the Mediterranean is unknown. Carthage controlled the Strait of Gibraltar and tried to keep foreign ships away, so he may have sailed through quietly, or travelled overland to the Atlantic coast of Gaul and continued by sea from there.
From the ancient fragments, the outline of the trip looks like this:
- along the coasts of Iberia and western Gaul, past Brittany;
- to Belerion, the land's end of Cornwall, where local people mined tin and carried it to an island called Ictis for trade;
- around or across a large part of Britain, which he described as roughly triangular, with an exaggerated circumference;
- north to Thule, a land six days' sail beyond Britain;
- possibly east into the North Sea or Baltic, where he described an island called Abalus on which amber washed ashore each spring.
Some popular accounts state that he went on to Iceland and Scandinavia as fact. The evidence does not support that much certainty. The sequence of places, and even whether everything was one voyage, is reconstructed from scattered quotations.
The lost book and who preserved it
Pytheas wrote an account usually known as On the Ocean. No copy survives. Scholars have collected a few dozen fragments from later authors, including:
- Dicaearchus, a student of Aristotle, who apparently doubted him;
- Timaeus, the Sicilian historian, who accepted his amber report;
- Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, who used his latitude data;
- Polybius, who asked how a private man of modest means could afford such a voyage;
- Strabo, who quoted him at length while calling him a liar;
- Diodorus of Sicily and Pliny the Elder, who preserve details on Cornish tin, tides and amber, often through intermediaries.
The hostility of Polybius and Strabo shaped his reputation for centuries. Modern scholars tend to be kinder. Many of the things the ancient critics found absurd, such as summer nights only a couple of hours long, sound like genuine observations from northern latitudes.
Prettanike: the first name for Britain
Pytheas called the islands the Prettanic Isles, and the Greek form Prettanike is the earliest known name for Britain in writing. Linguists usually trace it to a Celtic word related to "painted" or "people of the forms", perhaps a reference to tattooing or body decoration. It is a guess that the name came to him from specific tribes he met, and the old idea that he learned it from the Welsh cannot be confirmed.
The fragments also include an early form of the name Orcas, linked to Orkney, which suggests he heard about or saw the far north of Scotland.
Thule, the frozen sea and the midnight sun
The most famous part of the account is Thule. Pytheas placed it six days' sail north of Britain, near a "congealed" or frozen sea. He described a strange mixture of sea, air and ice that some writers called a "marine lung", which many modern readers interpret as slushy pack ice or sea fog. He also reported places where the sun barely set in midsummer.
Where Thule was is still unresolved. Candidates include the coast of Norway, Iceland, Shetland, the Faroe Islands and even Greenland. Norway fits the idea of an inhabited land where people threshed grain indoors, while Iceland fits the sailing distance and drift ice but seems to have had no inhabitants at that time. Since the fragments disagree, the honest answer is that we do not know. The name survived anyway: "Ultima Thule" became a phrase for the farthest edge of the known world.
Science on the voyage: latitude and tides
Pytheas' most lasting contribution may be scientific. His solstice measurement at Massalia allowed Hipparchus to argue that Massalia and Byzantium lay on the same parallel. His readings in the north helped later geographers chart lines of latitude far beyond the Mediterranean.
He also noticed the large tides of the Atlantic, very different from the nearly tideless Mediterranean, and is credited as the first known writer to connect tides with the phases of the Moon. Pliny reports him claiming tides of 80 cubits in Britain, far higher than anything measured today; a storm surge or an error in transmission may explain it.
Was he really the first?
He is the first known by name. Tin from Cornwall was reaching the Mediterranean long before him, and Carthaginian sailors such as Himilco are said to have explored Atlantic Europe earlier, though their reports are even more fragmentary. So the safest statement is that Pytheas left the earliest surviving written account of Britain by a Mediterranean visitor, not that no one from the south had ever been there.
That is still an extraordinary achievement. Some 2,350 years ago, using a sailing ship, a stick to measure shadows and his own curiosity, a man from Marseille brought the edge of the world into Greek geography.
Sources: Wikipedia: Pytheas; story originally shared by Greek Reporter. Photos: Rvalette, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0); Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
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