Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax

The Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax (or Pseudo-Skylax, Ps.-Skylax) is an ancient Greek periplus (periplous, 'circumnavigation') that ranks among the 'minor' Greek geographers, dating from the mid-4th century BC. The name of Scylax (or Skylax) applied to the text may be a pseudepigraphical appeal to authority: Herodotus mentions a Scylax of Caryanda, a Greek navigator who in the late sixth century BC explored the coast of the Indian Ocean on behalf of the Persians. Many details in the work, however, reflect fourth-century BC knowledge of the world; since, therefore, it cannot be by the sixth-century Scylax, it and its author are habitually referred to as Pseudo-Scylax.

Text

There remains one primary manuscript, Parisinus suppl. gr. (Supplément grec) 443 (also known as the Pithou MS after its sometime owner), which dates to the thirteenth century AD and is the original of those upon which the first printed edition of 1600 was based. Two later copies of this manuscript, which is notoriously corrupt, add nothing of substance. The principal manuscript was inaccessible to scholars for over two centuries until the 1830s, when it was bought by what is now the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Pseudo-Scylax takes a clockwise circumnavigation of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, starting in the Iberia and ending in West Africa, beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar). The NW African section is sometimes thought to have been sourced from the Periplus of Hanno the Navigator, though a close comparison makes the differences between the two texts more apparent. Rather than the record of a voyage, or a compilation of eye-witness accounts of voyages, the work is probably an attempt at a quasi-scientific geographical account of the parts of the world accessible to Greeks in the 4th century BC. It can plausibly be associated with philosophical and scientific activities at Athens under Plato's successors in the Academy; the author was perhaps also in contact with Aristotle and Theophrastos in the years preceding the foundation of the Peripatos (Lyceum). One of the aims of the work seems to be to calculate a sailing length of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, a geographical undertaking in which Aristotle and his pupil Dikaiarchos of Messana went further, perhaps building upon the work of our unknown author.

Modern publications

"The Periplus of Scylax" was first published in Augsburg in 1600 by David Hoeschel along with other minor Greek geographers. In Amsterdam, the periplus was published by Vossius in 1639 and then by Hudson in his "Geographi Graeci Minores". In Paris, the periplus was published in 1826 by Gail and in Berlin it was published in 1831 by R.H. Klausen. The Greek text of Fabricius (2nd edition 1878; below) was in some respects superior to that of Müller (1855), but the latter has until recently been regarded as standard. Further revision of the Greek text, however, has been undertaken by Counillon (2004) and Shipley (2011).

External links

• Jacob Gronovius, in Geographia Antiqua, Leiden 1697
• Karl Müller, in Geographi graeci minores (Greek-Latin Edition), 1882.
• Klausen - 1831
• Jean Antoine Letronne, in Fragments des poemes géographiques (French), Paris, 1840
• Fabricius 1878
• Patrick Counillon, Pseudo-Skylax, Le Périple du Pont-Euxin (Bordeaux, 2004).
• Graham Shipley, Pseudo-Skylax's Periplous: The Circumnavigation of the Inhabited World. Text, Translation and Commentary (Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press/The Exeter Press), 2011. ISBN 978-1-904675-82-2 hardback, 978-1-904675-83-9 paperback. For details see http://www.exeterpress.co.uk/en-gb/Book/537/Pseudo-Skylax's_Periplous.html