Implausibility of Pytheas's Geography
In treating of the geography of Europe I shall say
nothing of the ancient geographers, but shall confine my
attention to their modern critics, Dicaearchus, Eratosthenes,
who is the most recent writer on geography, and Pytheas, who
has misled many readers by professing to have traversed on
foot the whole of Britain, the coastline of which island, he
says, is more than forty thousand stades. And again by his
stories of Thule and the countries in its neighbourhood, "in
which," he says, "there is neither unmixed land or sea or air,
but a kind of compound of all three (like the jelly-fish or Pulmo
Marinus), in which earth and sea and everything else are held
in suspense, and which forms a kind of connecting link to the
whole, through which one can neither walk nor sail." This
substance, which he says is like the Pulmo Marinus, he saw
with his own eyes, the rest he learnt by report.
Such
is Pytheas's story, and he adds that, on his return thence,
he traversed the whole of the coast of Europe
from Gades to the Tanais. But we cannot
believe that a private person, who was also a poor man, should
have made such immense journeys by land and sea. Even
Eratosthenes doubted this part of his story, though he believed
what he said about Britain, and Gades, and Iberia. I would
much rather believe the Messenian (Euhemerus) than him.
The latter is content with saying that he sailed to one country
which he calls Panchaia;
1 while the former asserts that he has
actually seen the whole northern coast of Europe up to the
very verge of the world, which one would hardly believe of
Hermes himself if he said it. Eratosthenes calls Euhemerus
a Bergaean,
2 yet believes Pytheas, though Dicaearchus himself
did not.
3 . . . Eratosthenes and Dicaearchus give mere
popular guesses as to distances.
