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The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek by Barry Cunliffe
I have a fascination with what Britain was like before the Romans arrived, which is a bit of a frustrating fascination because of course the only written sources we have are from the Romans themselves. But a name which keeps coming up in my reading is that of Pytheas the Greek, who visited the British Isles, and possibly made it as far as Iceland, in roughly 320BC (around 300 years before Julius Caesar showed up). Unfortunately Pytheas' own book, On the Ocean, was lost centuries ago, but he is referenced by so many ancient writers - Strabo (who accused him of being a liar because Pytheas' writings disagreed with Strabo's world view), Pliny the Elder, Timaeus, Polybius, Posidonius, and others - that it is possible to at least get an idea of what he wrote.
Cunliffe sets the scene by explaining the Mediterranean scene of Pytheas' time and before. Pytheas himself was a resident of Massalia (Marseilles), a Greek colony which was trading both across the Mediterranean and into the continent to the north, but it is likely that goods came in through the trade routes from the various Gaulish tribes rather than the Greeks going far inland themselves. Their view of the world was that there was little beyond the Mediterranean, and while they would have had some awareness of the islands to the north where the tin came from, these were fabled lands since sea exploration beyond the Pillars of Hercules was not really their thing. Pytheas, however, set off on a unique, expedition to our knowledge, which it is argued was facilitated by taking local vessels from place to place rather than by using his own ship and crew. Cunliffe talks about the tin trade in Cornwall, which is likely to be where Pytheas first landed in the British Isles, and also looks at the scientific measurements of the maximum height of the sun that he took at various points going north, which later helped Hipparchus calculate his series of latitudes. He certainly seems to have reached the Orkneys and Shetlands, and it appears that he also travelled to Iceland and even as far as the Circle of the Bear (Arctic Circle) since he apparently writes about a land six days' sailing north of the furthest part of Britain. It may be that he also travelled to the Skagerrak and the east coast of Sweden, since he also apparently talks about the source of amber, although that may have been reported information and he instead travelled down the east coast of the British Isles before heading back to the Mediterranean.
It is unfortunate that we don't still have Pytheas' book because he apparently also made journeys inland and I would have loved to have read what he described of the peoples he encountered. However, Cunliffe's short book on the voyage incorporates plenty of archaeological information as well, and it's a really interesting read.