52 Facts About Pytheas

Pytheas was the first known Greek scientific visitor to see and describe the Arctic, polar ice, and the Celtic and Germanic tribes.

Pytheas is the first person on record to describe the midnight sun.

Pytheas introduced the idea of distant Thule to the geographic imagination, and his account of the tides is the earliest one known that suggests the moon as their cause.

Pytheas described his travels in a work that has not survived; only excerpts remain, quoted or paraphrased by later authors.

Much of what is known about Pytheas comes from commentary written by historians during the classical period hundreds of years after Pytheas's journeys occurred, most familiarly in Strabo's Geographica, passages in the world history written by Diodorus of Sicily between 60 and 30 BC, and Pliny's Natural History.

Henry Fanshawe Tozer estimated that Pytheas' voyage occurred about 330 BC, derived from three main sources.

Pytheas was the first documented Mediterranean mariner to reach the British Isles.

The early part of Pytheas' voyage was outlined by statements of Eratosthenes that Strabo said are false because they were taken from Pytheas.

Mention of these places in a journal of the voyage indicates that Pytheas passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and sailed north along the coast of Portugal.

Strabo reported that Pytheas said he "travelled over the whole of Britain that was accessible".

The word epelthein, at root "come upon", does not imply any specific method, and Pytheas did not elaborate.

Strabo and Diodorus Siculus never saw Pytheas' work, says Nansen, but they and others read of him in Timaeus.

Nansen later states that Pytheas must have stopped to obtain astronomical data.

Pytheas could have travelled any perimeter between that number and Diodorus'.

Polybius added that Pytheas said he traversed the whole of Britain on foot, of which he, Polybius, was skeptical.

The issue of what he did say can never be settled until more fragments of Pytheas's writings are found.

Rather, Pytheas brought back the P-Celtic form from more geographically accessible regions where Welsh or Breton are spoken presently.

Furthermore, some proto-Celtic was spoken over all of Greater Britain, and this particular spelling is prototypical of those more populous regions, but there is no evidence that Pytheas distinguished between the peoples of the archipelago.

Diodorus - based on Pytheas - reported that Britain is cold and subject to frosts, being "too much subject to the Bear", and not "under the Arctic pole", as some translations say.

The first written reference to Scotland was in 320 BC by Pytheas, who called the northern tip of Britain "Orcas", the source of the name of the Orkney islands.

Nansen claimed that according to this statement, Pytheas was there in person and that the 21- and 22-hour days must be the customary statement of latitude by length of longest day.

Pytheas, as related by Hipparchus, probably cited the place in Celtica where he first made land.

Pytheas crossed the waters northward from Berrice, in the north of the British Isles, but whether to starboard, larboard, or straight ahead is not known.

The fact that Pytheas returned from the vicinity of the Baltic favors Procopius's opinion.

The fact that Pytheas lived centuries before the colonization of Iceland and Greenland by European agriculturalists makes them less likely candidates, as he stated that Thule was populated and its soil was tilled.

Pytheas spoke of the waters around Thule and of those places where land properly speaking no longer exists, nor sea nor air, but a mixture of these things, like a "marine lung", in which it was said that earth and water and all things are in suspension as if this something was a link between all these elements, on which one can neither walk nor sail.

Strabo said that Pytheas gave an account of "what is beyond the Rhine as far as Scythia", which he, Strabo, thought was false.

Pytheas adds that the inhabitants of the region use it as fuel instead of wood and sell it to the neighbouring Teutones.

Pytheas claimed to have explored the entire north; however, he turned back at the mouth of the Vistula, the border with Scythia.

Pytheas had heard of the Sauromatai, but had no idea where to place them.

Strabo distinguished the Venedi, who were likely Slavs From these few references, which are the only surviving evidence apart from glottochronology and place name analysis, it would seem that the Balts of Pytheas' time were well past the Common Balto-Slavic stage, and likely spoke a number of related dialects.

In other, even more speculative interpretations, Pytheas returned north and the Tanais is not the Don but is a northern river, such as the Elbe.

Nevertheless, Pytheas did obtain latitudes, which, according to Strabo, he expressed in proportions of the gnomon, or trigonometric tangents of angles of elevation to celestial bodies.

Pytheas reported that the pole was an empty space at the corner of a quadrangle, the other three sides of which were marked by stars.

Pytheas sailed northward with the intent of locating the Arctic Circle and exploring the "frigid zone" to the north of it at the extreme of the Earth.

Pytheas did not know the latitude of the circle in degrees.

In whatever mathematical form Pytheas knew the location, he could only have determined when he was there by taking periodic readings of the elevation of the pole.

Pytheas must have made frequent overnight stops to use his gnomon and talk to the natives, which would have required interpreters, probably acquired along the way.

The first Ionian philosopher, Thales, was known for his ability to measure the distance of a ship at sea from a cliff by the very method Pytheas used to determine the latitude of Massalia, the trigonometric ratios.

That is what Pytheas means when he says that Thule is located at the place where the Arctic Circle is identical to the Tropic of Cancer.

Pytheas had proved that Marseille and Byzantium were on the same parallel.

Hipparchus, relying on Pytheas, according to Strabo, placed this area south of Britain, but he, Strabo, calculated that it was north of Ireland.

One well-circulated but unevidenced answer to the paradox is that Pytheas was referring to a storm surge.

The words are too ambiguous to make an exact determination of Pytheas' meaning, whether diurnal or spring and neap tides are meant, or whether full and new moons or the half-cycles in which they occur.

Pytheas could have meant that spring and neap tides were caused by new and full moons, which is partially correct in that spring tides occur at those times.

However imperfect or imperfectly related the viewpoint, Pytheas was the first to associate the tides to the phases of the moon.

Pytheas was a central source of information on the North Sea and the subarctic regions of western Europe to later periods, and possibly the only source.

Strabo, citing Polybius, accused Pytheas of promulgating a fictitious journey he could never have funded, as he was a private individual and a poor man.

Still, some of the Celtic lands were on the channel and were visible from it, which Pytheas should have mentioned but Strabo implies he did not.

Pytheas simply did not believe the earth was inhabited north of Ierne.

The process continues into modern times; for example, Pytheas is a key theme in Charles Olson's Maximus Poems.

Details of Pytheas' voyage serve as the backdrop for Chapter I of Poul Anderson's science fiction novel, The Boat of a Million Years.