Pytheas: from the Mediterranean to Thule, where the sun does not set

Imagine a Greek raised in the Mediterranean sun who reaches a northern sea where there is no night in summer. Round discs of ice float on the water, and in the fog land, water and air cannot be told apart. He returns and writes it all down, and his own countrymen call him a liar. This was Pytheas, a native of the Greek city of Massalia in southern France. His voyage is counted among the most remarkable expeditions of the ancient world.

Background: the sailor of Massalia

Writing in the World History Encyclopedia, Thomas Garlinghouse says Pytheas was a citizen of Massalia, today’s Marseille in France. The city was a major trading power in the western Mediterranean. Pytheas was known as a skilled navigator and astronomer. Almost no personal information about him survives. The Greek historian Polybius scornfully called him a “common man” and a “poor man”.

At the time, the peoples of the Mediterranean obtained tin and amber from distant lands in the north, but those lands were legend to them. In Greek mythology a people called the Hyperboreans lived there. Pytheas reached those regions himself.

The journey: from Gibraltar to Britain

Pytheas wrote an account of his voyage called “On the Ocean”. It no longer exists. Only fragments survive, quoted in the books of other writers such as Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Diodorus and Polybius. Scholars have pieced together his route from these fragments, and many details rest on conjecture.

According to the World History Encyclopedia, he set out from Massalia around 330 BC. He passed through the “Pillars of Hercules”, the Strait of Gibraltar, into the Atlantic. He then sailed north along the western coasts of Spain and France. He crossed the English Channel and reached “Belerion”, which scholars take to be Cornwall. There he saw the local people mining tin and preparing it for trade.

Strabo, a fierce critic of Pytheas, writes that Pytheas claimed to have travelled over the accessible parts of Britain and put the island’s circuit at more than 40,000 stadia. Pliny says that, according to Pytheas, the tide in Britain rises as much as 80 cubits. These figures are exaggerated. What matters is that people of the Mediterranean, whose sea has very small tides, were hearing for the first time of the great tides of the ocean.

Despite his hostility, Strabo accepts one remark of Pytheas about the cold northern regions as reasonable: because there is little sun and the weather is seldom dry, people thresh their grain not on open threshing floors but in large barns.

What he saw: Thule and the “sea lung”

The most famous report of Pytheas concerns “Thule”. Pliny writes that, according to Pytheas, Thule is six days’ sail north of Britain. Around the longest day of summer there is no night there, and in winter there is no day. According to Strabo, Pytheas wrote that for Thule the summer tropic and the Arctic Circle are the same, meaning it lies near the Arctic Circle.

Where was Thule? The question has never been settled. According to the World History Encyclopedia, some scholars think it was Iceland and others Norway. Pliny adds that a “frozen sea” lies a day’s sail from Thule.

Strabo quotes a strange sentence of Pytheas. In the north there is a place where there is no separate land, water or air, but a mixture of all three, like a “sea lung”, in which one can neither walk nor sail. Pytheas said he had seen this himself. According to Garlinghouse, “sea lung” was the Greek name for a jellyfish. Most scholars believe Pytheas was actually describing round discs of floating sea ice (“pancake ice”), for which his language had no word.

On the way back he probably came down the east coast of Britain and then went east along the coast of northern Europe. According to Pliny, Pytheas mentioned a Germanic people called the Gutones, who lived on the shore of an estuary. A day’s sail from them lay an island called “Abalus”, where in spring the waves cast amber ashore. The people there burned it as fuel and sold it to their neighbours.

Significance: “liar” or scientist?

Strabo repeatedly called Pytheas a liar. He wrote that Pytheas’s errors about countries people know prove that what he says about distant countries must be even more mistaken. According to Garlinghouse, this hostility probably came from Polybius, and the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe has called it “professional jealousy”.

Yet Strabo’s own book also shows that Pytheas worked out the latitude of Massalia by measuring the sun’s shadow with a “gnomon”, a vertical rod for measuring shadows. The later astronomer Hipparchus relied on this measurement. According to Garlinghouse, the surviving fragments of his book also discuss the moon’s influence on the tides.

Legacy

According to the World History Encyclopedia, few historians today doubt that the voyage was real. The debate is only over exactly where he went. A statue of him stands in Marseille today, and the word “Thule” lives on in European languages in the sense of “the farthest edge of the world”.