exploration: Rome of modern Pakistan to its mouth, and to have come to the area of the Suez In the second half of the fourth century b.c.e., Alexander the Great’s invasion and conquest of Persia ended in a march of discovery from the area of modern Syria and Turkey, through what is now Iraq and Iran, bringing him to Bactria, Sogdiana, Samarqand, and ultimately to the Indus River and the ends of the Punjab in India At this point his Macedonian army, who had walked thousands of miles and fought many battles, refused to go further, and Alexander took them on a forced march back west, which entailed a grim passage of the Gedrosia Desert At the end of the fourth century b.c.e the Greek explorer and navigator Pytheas of Massilia (modern-day Marseille) wrote About the Ocean, which recounts his journey west and north, from Gades (present-day Cádiz) in southern Spain, up the Spanish coast, past the mouth of the Loire river (near modern-day Nantes), and to the Cassiterides (the “Tin Isles,” the modern British Isles), and particularly to Belerium (modern Cornwall), an important center for trading tin Copper and tin made bronze, and of the two elemental metals tin was much rarer in the Mediterranean world Pytheas is believed to have circumnavigated Britain and recorded other lands that scholars have tentatively identified as Norway, the Vistula River (in modern-day Poland), and an island in the North Sea that may have been Helgoland, which Pytheas reported as being rich in amber Euhemerus of Messene, also from the late fourth century b.c.e., was a famous author of the literature of exploration Euhemerus served under the Macedonian Cassander, who ruled in European Greece after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 b.c.e Euhemerus’s account of a voyage to islands of the Indian Ocean, including perhaps Sri Lanka, was popular and widely quoted by later authors, such as first century b.c.e historian Diodorus Siculus Although the writings of Euhemerus are based on real knowledge of Indian islands that may reflect the work of more authentic explorers, they are regarded as entirely fictional Because Alexander’s conquests left Macedonians in charge of pieces of the former Persian Empire, which stretched from the Aegean to India, knowledge of the eastern parts of the world became much more readily available to the Greeks Alexander had left Sibyrtius as governor of Gedrosia, in the east of his conquered territory, and Sibyrtius sent one Megasthenes as an ambassador to India Megasthenes met with Candragupta (r ca 321–ca 297 b.c.e.), founder of the Maurya Empire in northern India, and returned to write of his travels in a work entitled Indika Even under the Romans, many of the fundamental works of geography and books about exploration that provided geographical data were written in Greek by Greeks For example, the Greek historian Polybius, who served with the Roman general Scipio during the Second Punic War in the second century b.c.e., accompanied Scipio on an exploratory voyage into the Atlantic Ocean Also during the second century 443 b.c.e the historian and geographer Agatharchides of Cnidus wrote of his voyage around the Red Sea, with descriptions of Arabia and Ethiopia The historians Diodorus Siculus and Aelianus as well as the geographer Strabo, all of whom lived in Rome and wrote in Greek, relied heavily on Agatharchides’ work for their own Ptolemy (also known as Claudius Ptolemaeus), considered one of the greatest ancient geographers, lived during the second century c.e His treatises cover mathematics and astronomy, but he is most famous for his massive Geography, the first work to use latitude and longitude to identify the locations of places For his description of lands to the east, Ptolemy relied heavily on Marinus of Tyre, about whom little is known except that he wrote during the first century c.e and that he provided a cultural and geographical description of the “Seres,” the ancient Greek term for the Chinese Ptolemy also mentions a certain businessman from Damascus named Maes or Titianus, who claimed to know overland routes for travel to China, thus perhaps anticipating Marco Polo by over a thousand years Ironically, the most significant error in Ptolemy’s Geography can tell us much about ancient exploration His maps show a large landmass connecting southern Africa to China, depicting the India Ocean as an enclosed sea In a work as thoroughly researched as his, Ptolemy’s error is convincing proof that no ancient Greek or Roman by the second century c.e had circumnavigated Africa ROME BY DUANE W ROLLER The Romans had no sense of exploration for its own merits; the Latin word exploratio refers to a military reconnaissance But since the Roman world expanded over vast territories and since there were trade and commercial contacts throughout much of the Eastern Hemisphere, almost by accident the Romans were able to explore large regions, though inevitability as a by-product of political or mercantile interests In their early years the Romans made no addition to geographical knowledge Their expansion from the fourth into the first century b.c.e throughout Italy, into the western Mediterranean region, and eventually into the Greek world did not reach any areas previously unknown to Mediterranean cultures Roman exploration actually began with their destruction of Carthage in 146 b.c.e At this time the Romans acquired the cultural heritage of their defeated enemy and learned about a wide range of Carthaginian exploration into areas previously unknown to the Romans: down the west coast of Africa (and perhaps around the continent), into subSaharan Africa, and along the Atlantic coasts as far as the British islands Roman curiosity led Scipio Aemilianus (ca 185–129 b.c.e.), the conqueror of Carthage, to commission his adviser, the historian Polybius (ca 200–118 b.c.e.), to investigate Polybius made a number of trips, going down the West African coast as far as the tropics and across France to its north-