The Voyage of Pytheas, the Arctic Explorer of Ancient Greece
Pytheas is not a familiar name, even to those familiar with the ancient world. But in this man we see a resolve, a determination to explore and to discover, which merits him a place among the greats.
The world used to be a smaller one than it is now. For the civilizations of ancient Europe it scarcely left the Mediterranean, and on the shores of this small but crowded inland sea half of human history was written.
This is not to say the ancients did not know of a wider world beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which were said to guard the entrance to the Mediterranean from the fearsome Atlantic beyond. They may not have written “here be dragons” on their maps as later cartographers did when faced with the unknown, but they knew the unknown was out there.
And they knew things about it, as well. The Phoenicians had visited the British Isles, coveting these wild lands for their tin and apparently dismissing all else. They and others had heard stories from the bravest and widest ranging of explorers and travelers, who in turn had heard tale of a frozen land in the far north, populated by a people the Greeks called Hyperborean.
They were so named literally for their existence beyond the knowledge of the Greeks: they are Hyperboreans because they were beyond Boreas, the god of the north wind. Their homeland was described as a land of ice and snow, sometimes frozen and sometimes bathed in sunlight for weeks at a time.
Such stories were little more than fables for the Greeks, tempted by their geography and their belligerent neighbors to look inwards. But not so for Pytheas, determined to see these wonders with his own eyes, to confirm their existence, and to report back the truth of what he saw.
Without Pytheas, ancient Greece would have been a smaller world.
A Lost Treasure
Pytheas was born in Massalia around 350 BC into the world of Greek Antiquity. These were not the Bronze Age Greeks of Homer, these were later Greeks, bonded by their shared history and watching their culture spread across Europe like a wildfire.
Massalia was a Greek colony in France, buried underneath modern Marseille. Pytheas was a man of discovery, or science, and apparently while still in his twenties he fitted out a voyage to explore the farthest reaches of the frozen north.
We know this because the Voyage of Pytheas was famous in his own lifetime, and the account he wrote of his journey and what he saw there was well known across the ancient world. Sadly none of his writings are known to survive, and we only know of Pytheas, or his voyage, through the writings of others.
For this we must thank the cheerful plagiarism of the Greeks and Romans, happy to copy wholesale what they could not research themselves. Much of Pytheas survives in Strabo, who dutifully wrote it down even as he ridiculed much of it.
He is also in Diodorus of Sicily, or even later in Pliny’s Natural History. Hundreds of years out of date, but faithfully copied and thus preserved.
And what we can put together from these records of his account tells of a truly challenging affair. The Strait of Gibraltar was off limits, blockaded by the Carthaginians, but here Pytheas was lucky. He found himself ready at a rare interlude in the two centuries of war between Carthage and her great enemy Rome, and an amenable and peaceful Carthage meant access to the Atlantic.
We know that Pytheas sailed upwards along the coast of Portugal and was the first to circumnavigate the British Isles, although the figure he apparently gave for its perimeter is wildly exaggerated. We also know that he went ashore.
Pytheas had a strange name for Britain, in that he named it at all. He called the island Bretannikē, a Celtic word which has nothing to do with archaic Greek and which therefore, presumably, the islanders gave themselves and revealed to the explorer. It even tells us where he likely was when he heard the name, as it matches Welsh or general Celtic but not Irish.
Pytheas described the island as a triangle, with the three corners being Kantion, Orkas and Belerion. The first two are clearly Kent and the Orkney Islands, names which are therefore ancient enough to come from prehistory, and the third can only be Cornwall.
Heading north from Britain, Pytheas became the first Greek in history to encounter pack ice, translated by Pliny as mare concretum, a solid (frozen) sea. Further still he apparently sailed into the Baltic, having passed along the northern coast of Germany.
But he did not sail far enough to meet the peoples who gave the Baltic its name. The Balts, from modern day Lithuania and Latvia, more or less bordered the Scythians, another people of the region, but while Pytheas knew the latter we have no record of him pressing on further. Thus we can define the apparent limit of his voyage.
In fact, with the Baltic Pytheas seems to have considered the north to be explored, his voyage to be done. And he had certainly seen many new things. He reckoned his latitude by the position of the sun and used it to navigate, he saw the midnight sun with his own eyes, and he was among the first to notice the link between the Moon and the tides.
But it is perhaps his most important discovery that is also his most enigmatic. Pytheas, leaving the British Isles and travelling to the Baltic, encountered a land he named Thule.
Perhaps this is the general name he gave to these northern wastes; the Greeks and later the Romans would certainly use it as a general term in this way. But Pytheas seems to confirm that there was a single, distinct Thule as well, and even gives details about it.
Thule was an island, 6 days’ sailing from the tip of Scotland. It is in or near the mare concretum and it is here that he saw the midnight sun. This necessarily places Thule in the Arctic Circle, else there would be sunsets all year round.
Was Pytheas lying, claiming to have seen with his own eyes what others had heard only from fairytale? What island could this be, so large, so far north, and so difficult to find today.
It is not Iceland, perhaps the obvious choice to a modern reader. Iceland seems the obvious candidate but it is too remote, and anyway is in entirely the wrong direction for Pytheas, heading to the Baltic from Britain.
It may be that the explorer witnessed an extraordinarily long day by Mediterranean standards and allowed a little artistic license to slip in for the purpose of personal aggrandizement. Strabo didn’t believe him, but then Strabo didn’t really believe the rest of his story, either.
If Pytheas reached the Arctic Circle that would be a rare feat indeed. But for an ancient Greek to have sailed round the coast of prehistoric Britain and reached as far as the Baltic made Pytheas’s voyage an expedition for the ages.
Header Image: Pytheas was not the first to hear of the frozen north, but he may well have been the first Greek to see it for himself. Source: Exekias / Public Domain.
