Chronicle 23. THE GENOCIDE OF THE HELLENES

Chronicle 23. THE GENOCIDE OF THE HELLENES

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 23. Η ΓΕΝΟΚΤΟΝΙΑ ΤΩΝ ΕΛΛΗΝΩΝ

● “Burning Books, Burying Scholars” ● Libraries Burned ● Massacre
of Thessalonica ● Delphi, the Serapeum and the Temple of Artemis
in Ruins ● Sacrilege of Alexander’s Sōma ● The Darkening Age

Michales Loukovikas

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GENOCIDE: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” (The UN Genocide Convention)

 

“In the early Middle Ages, in the time of Valens, Valentinian and Theodosius, there was a veritable ‘Inquisition’ established in the East, whose atrocities, persecutions and massacres were in no way inferior to those of the Spanish Inquisitors, who just persecuted people for sinister faith, while the Orthodox ‘penalizers’ in the Orient intended to eliminate en masse anyone who was Hellenizing or philosophizing on the face of the earth.” (Emmanuel Rhoides)

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NATURAL SELECTION, Charles Darwin’s revolutionary evolutionary theory – a cornerstone of biology – does not apply to man-made creations, which are instead “artificially selected” (censored), on the basis of ideological prejudice against all non-conformist ideas. Big Brother, it seems, has been omnipresent long before George Orwell’s 1984, burning not only books and libraries, but on many occasions the authors themselves, while “purifying” society and rewriting “history”… The motives of such crimes against humanity are very rarely outright politico-economical; as a rule, they are disguised behind a religious mask – especially when this religion is monotheistic, i.e. antagonistic to all the other creeds, authoritarian, and also power-hungry. Note that among the monotheistic religions, Christianism is the “unchallenged champion” of such crimes. Here is a short list of the first phase:

● 213–210 BCE. The “burning of books and burying of scholars” campaign during the Qin Dynasty of ancient China epitomizes the “war against freedom of thought and speech” that is still raging: all Chronicles, except those by the Qin historians, the Classics of Poetry and History, works of Confucius and several other schools, should be burned; and anyone discussing these books be executed. More than 460 scholars, or almost 1200, according to another count, were buried alive. The campaign soon led to revolts and war resulting to a further damage of texts of history: the capital was sacked and burned, in 207 BCE, destroying the officially sanctioned works in the imperial library, as well.

● 53 CE. Saul (Paul) of Tarsus, the trouble-maker, combined his preaching with book burning in Ephesus. This episode inspired many artists applauding such actions (see e.g. paintings by Eustache Le Sueur, Lucio Massari, Pieter Coecke van Aelst, etc.) that all fascists imitated with enthusiasm… Acts of the Apostles, 19: “Τhey counted the value of [the burned books] and found it came to 50,000 pieces of silver” = more than 20 million €!

“Βurning of books and burying of scholars”: late dynastic period painting

● Circa 160 CE. Epicurus’ book Established Beliefs was burned in a Paphlagonian market, by order of a charlatan prophet. It was just a first glimpse of what would follow, as soon as these charlatans climbed up the highest echelons of power…

● 170s CE. Describing the Bible as “utter trash”, “a Greek intellectual named Celsus launched a monumental… attack against the new religion”, writes Catherine Nixey in her well-documented study, The Darkening Age / The Christian Destruction of the Classical World – hence our many, lengthy quotations in the previous, present, and next Chronicle. “Celsus was more than disdainful; he was worried that this religion – which he considered stupid, pernicious and vulgar – might spread even further and… damage Rome. Over 1,500 years later, the 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon would draw similar conclusions, laying part of the blame for the fall of the Roman Empire firmly at the door of the Christians… The Church… promptly placed his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books.⁽¹⁾ Even in liberal England, the atmosphere became fiercely hostile to the historian”.⁽²⁾

• ⁽¹⁾ Updating the Index (1900), pope Leo XIII stressed: “It is totally unacceptable to support, defend or allow freedom of thought, of speech… as if these rights are given to man by Nature”!

• ⁽²⁾ But even in the 20th century, the Pythons’ “1979 film, Life of Brian [parodying the life of Jesus], was banned in several countries.” (C. Nixey)

Library of Celsus in Ephesus (2nd century CE), the third-largest in the Roman world after Alexandria and Pergamum, was the funerary monument of Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus, governor of Asia (Minor). The library, an architectural marvel, and its 12,000 scrolls, were burned by Christian Gothic barbarians, who also destroyed the magnificent Temple of Artemis there, one of the 7 wonders of antiquity (262 CE). The library’s façade was restored in the 1970s.

● However, both Celsus and Gibbon were right: “What… if God and Caesar both laid claim to the same thing? Well, said the great thinkers of the first Christian century, in that case God took precedence. As Augustine put it, if God’s law diverged from Roman law, then the Heavenly City and its inhabitants were compelled ‘to dissent, and to become obnoxious to those who think differently’… At the highest level the Church was starting to challenge the power of the state. Roman observers had long noticed the Christian tendency to consider themselves above the law… ‘There is no crime’, declared Shenoute, ‘for those who have Christ’… Murder committed for the sake of God was not a crime but actually ‘a prayer’… As Christianity gained in power their acts of defiance gained in boldness. Courtrooms in the east of the empire were disrupted by sinister groups of dark-clad, psalm-chanting monks… Monks – anonymous, rootless, untraceable – were able to commit atrocities with near impunity… Even Theodosius, a wholeheartedly Christian emperor, mutedly observed that ‘the monks commit many crimes’.” Gibbon, on his part, comparing the monks with “a race of filthy animals”, wrote: “In almost every province of the Roman world, an army of fanatics, without authority and without discipline, invaded the peaceful inhabitants; and the ruin of the fairest structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of those barbarians”.

● Catherine Nixey begins her dramatic narrative in Palmyra in 385 CE. Exactly the same scenes, unfortunately, would unfold in the city of Zenobia, the “nymph of the desert”, even nowadays, committed by the terrorists of the Islamic State. But what’s happened now in a single region of Syria, or in one country, Afghanistan, by the Taliban, was then about to spread to an entire empire and last for many centuries:

It’s ironic that the new fundamentalists’ target was again Athena: the statue of Al-lāt, equated with the goddess of Wisdom, destroyed in 2015; so was the Lion at the temple’s entrance. (We see Asclepius on the wall). Other ISIS crimes: the monumental arch in Palmyra’s colonnade (also 2015); Tetrapylon (2017); the theatre (used for executions, 2017); the Baal Shamin temple, blown up; etc…

“The destroyers came from out of the desert. Palmyra must have been expecting them: for years, marauding bands of bearded, black-robed zealots, armed with little more than stones, iron bars and an iron sense of righteousness had been terrorizing the east of the Roman Empire. Their attacks were primitive, thuggish, and very effective. These men moved in packs – later in swarms of as many as five hundred – and when they descended, utter destruction followed. Their targets were the temples… Great stone columns that had stood for centuries collapsed in an afternoon; statues… had their faces mutilated; temples… fell in a single day… In this atmosphere, Palmyra’s temple of Athena was an obvious target… The ‘triumph’ of Christianity had begun.”

● “Today”, says Nixey, “almost no one has heard of Celsus and fewer still have read his work… It simply disappeared… Almost all information about him has vanished, including any of his names except his last… The long and inglorious Christian practice of censorship was now beginning… Celsus accused Christians of actively targeting idiocy in their recruitment… Lack of education made listeners vulnerable to dogma, he argued. Christians ‘do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe, and use such expressions as «Do not ask questions; just believe», and «Thy faith will save thee»’… They declare that ‘Wisdom in this life is evil, but foolishness is good’ – an almost precise quotation from [Saul’s (Paul’s) Epistle to the] Corinthians… To men as educated as Celsus… this was unfathomable: in Greek philosophy, faith was the lowest form of cognition.”

Christianism Has Never Been an Ideology of Liberation

● Christian leaders might have “actively targeted idiocy in their recruitment”, but were anything but… idiots themselves, choosing as their ideal target group “the vast majority of the empire – perhaps 80-90% of men, and a higher percentage of women – [that] was illiterate”. The Christians selected them because they were “hoi polloi” (the many), in order not to upgrade them (with “bread, education, freedom!”), but to downgrade the whole society to their level. Christianism has never been an ideology of liberation; quite the opposite:

The Slave Market, by Gustave Boulanger (c. 1882): in the Roman era,
the “merchandise” was multi-racial; racism would appear later…

“Many of those who set out for the hills” to become monks, Nixey points out, “were poor and illiterate. Some were even slaves – much to the irritation of their Christian superiors. Nietzsche and Engels would later equate Christianity and its values with slaves and slave morality – but if that was true, then no one had told the most powerful Christians in this period. They had no truck with such dangerously revolutionary ideas as the emancipation of slaves. Far from encouraging the escape of Christian slaves, senior clerics cracked down hard on any who attempted to escape their mortal bondage by disappearing into the desert for a more heavenly servitude. When one bishop advised slaves to desert their masters and become ascetics, the Church was appalled and promptly excommunicated him. ‘We shall never’, stated a Canon of the Holy Apostles, ‘allow such a thing, which brings sorrow to the masters to whom the slaves belong’… In the 4th century, St Theodore appeared: a saint whose speciality was finding missing slaves. Sleep on St Theodore’s tomb and… he would appear in your dream and show you where your recalcitrant slave was hiding.” (Then the Church will collect the reward!)

Seen from this perspective, the analogies between Christianism and fascism – apart from the same methodology – become more apparent. Both, though they are systemic, tempt and entrap the underprivileged. (More about Christianism and slavery, and how they are related, you can read in the next Chronicle).

A scholar on a sarcophagus, 180-200 CE

“A few decades after Celsus wrote On the True Doctrine, a more monumental assault was made on the Christian faith by another Greek philosopher”, Nixey goes on. “Yet today this philosopher’s name, like Celsus’s, has been all but forgotten. He was, we know, called Porphyry and his attack was immense – at least 15 books [Against the Christians]… It targeted Old Testament history, and poured scorn on the blind faith of Christians… Porphyry’s works were deemed so powerful and frightening that they were completely eradicated. The first Christian emperor, Constantine… announced… they were destroyed. In the same letter Constantine also consigned the works of the heretic, Arius, to the flames and announced that anyone who was found hiding one of Arius’s books would be put to death. A century or so later, in AD 448, Porphyry’s books were burned again, this time on the orders of… Theodosius II and Valentinian III.”

The Christians’ Psychopathology

● The Christian counter-attack to Celsus came some eighty-odd years later, and signed by Origen: thanks to his text, we now know what the True Doctrine was about. In the meantime, Clement of Alexandria formulated a Christian guide in his own manual, Paedagogus (Tutor; a most inappropriate title), which exposes alarmingly the psychopathology of Christian leaders, even before these fanatics climbed up to power. What Nixey says is most revealing and hair-raising:

“As Clement wrote, the Lord himself had said: ‘I will sharpen my sword… and render justice to mine enemies, and requite those who hate me. I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh from the blood of the wounded’. (Who on earth was there – and where? – to listen to this sadist and write down his dictum?) “Clement,” proceeds Nixey, “in… authoritative paragraphs, peppered with frequent… threats from the scriptures, advised the faithful on every aspect of their day, from what they were allowed to eat and drink to what they could wear; from how they could style their hair to even what they were allowed to do in bed.⁽³⁾ In… his guide he censured almost every human activity.”

• ⁽³⁾ Preachers: “Sex between husband and wife is allowed but it should not be enjoyed.” [!] (C.N.)

Fresco from Herculaneum depicting a banquet

Two centuries later, “John Chrysostom advised avoiding dinners altogether in favour of funerals. ‘It is better to go’, he thundered… ‘where there is weeping, lamentation, groans, and anguish, and so much sadness, than where there is the dance, the cymbals, and laughter, and luxury, and full eating and drinking’… [! In addition,] contact with women of all kinds was something to be feared and, if possible, avoided altogether… [! But he] jubilantly observed: ‘The tradition of the forefathers… the tyranny of joy, [!] the accursed festivals… have been obliterated’: Pagan festivals, with their exuberant merriment and dancing, were banned… In 407 [the year John died], the old merry ceremonies were forbidden… If anyone declared himself an official in charge of pagan festivals then, the law said, he would be executed.”⁽⁴⁾

• ⁽⁴⁾ “The firebrand preacher John Chrysostom – John ‘Goldenmouth’ – [the rock star of the era] was so charismatic that crowds of Christians would pack into Antioch’s Great Church to hear him speak, his eyes flashing, then leave as soon as he was finished, ‘as if’, he observed, with a distinct want of monkish humility, ‘I were a concert performance’.” (C.N.)

“In literature of a newly sadistic strain, Christian writers outlined in graphic detail what awaited those who did not comply with the edicts… The punishments for sinners were atrocious… The Apocalypse of Peter reveled in verse after stomach-churning verse on what happened in Hell. In it, the reader is taken on an infernal safari in which the retributions for various misdeeds are pointed out with relish… Even children don’t escape.”⁽⁵⁾

• ⁽⁵⁾ See what a church of Lesbos is distributing now (April 2019) to elementary school pupils – an entire screed, entitled Children’s Guide to Confession (of “sins”)… Just get an idea:

● “Do you by chance like to listen to secular songs on the radio? (…)
● “Do you by chance go to the theatre and the cinema? (…)
● “Do you by chance go to parties and dance sinful dances? (…)”
There’s no end to children’s “sins”, arranged in an array of categories and countless chapters…

Oedipus and the Sphinx, by Gustave Moreau

“Theatre was abhorred as a repository of blasphemous filth… What the Greeks considered civilized – even civilizing – Christian preachers reviled as ‘depravity’… a ‘disease’ and a ‘wanton madness’… Everything about the theatre was… from the Devil. The theatre… was a place of lust and drunkenness, a ‘citadel of all vile practices’. The ‘abominations’ that happened on stage were a ‘lawless corruption’ designed to pollute the ears and eyes of the audience… Tragedies were bloody, comedies were wanton… Actors were whores: Christians regularly substituted the words ‘actor’ and ‘dancer’ with the word ‘prostitute’; the theatre itself was ‘the temple of lust for prostitution’. Almost every kind of display was… stained with Satanism… As one preacher boasted, Christians smashed the flutes of the ‘musicians of the demons’ to pieces… The music that people danced to was considered perilous, for music can take away men’s senses, and mesmerize them, whipping them into a frenzy of lust… As Tertullian joyfully explained, all of these miscreants would be consumed in the avenging fires of the Lord – and he and his fellow obedient Christians would be there, enjoying the sight. What need for the theatre or the hippodrome now?, he asked. Because for the Christian faithful there are ‘other spectacles to come – that day of the Last Judgement, when the hoary age of the world and all its generations will be consumed in one fire’.”

Constantine: Genocide Act I – Persecutions in Perpetuum

● 313. The Edict of Milan on Freedom of religion, which Constantine the “Great” and “Saint” adopted, was meant to protect the Christians, but as it turned out, it seems it concerned only them. Following Galerius’ initiative, who had adopted a similar measure in 311, the emperor aimed at consolidating peace (Pax Romana) in the empire, something that had not been achieved through the persecution of Christians. But he was a… mama’s boy (as his mother, Helena, was a fanatical Christian). Therefore, instead of imposing the strict implementation of religious freedom, he was anything but impartial: the ancient gods on his coinage were replaced by Christian symbols, especially the “XP” monogram, which he had also on his labarum. Hence it was obvious the persecutions would go on; there was just a change of roles: the formerly persecuted were now the persecutors. It was also obvious that the new persecutions would be much more brutal and bloody, widespread and long-lasting (in perpetuum), for the very simple reason that the Christian leaders, who found themselves in a dominant position, confronted the vast majority of the empire’s subjects, who remained faithful to their traditional gods.⁽⁶⁾ Besides, it was even ironic that the persecutions were further multiplied because, as soon as the Christian priesthood was legalized, infighting broke out! As early as 313, the year of the edict, until 317, bishops threw brickbats against bishops in Carthage, until they asked for Constantine’s arbitration. There were three ecclesiastical councils and two trials before one faction (that of Donatus) was judged schismatic, with the result that its property was confiscated and the clergy banished.

The Pearls of Aphrodite, by
Herbert James Draper (1907)

• ⁽⁶⁾ “Christians at that moment were very much in the minority. It has been estimated they made up as little as between 7 and 10% of the empire’s total population.” (C.N.)

“The emperor Constantine proclaimed himself a follower of Christ”, recounts Nixey. “Under his auspices, the Church was soon exempted from taxes and its hierarchy started to be richly rewarded. Bishops were paid five times as much as professors, six times as much as doctors – as much even as a local governor. Eternal delight in the next life, bureaucratic preferment in this. What more could one wish for?”

● 325-326. Emperor Constantine ordered a temple of Aphrodite in Jerusalem to be demolished for the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre there. In the meantime, all the Hellenic sanctuaries on Athos were destroyed, while in the following years even more ancient temples were burned and torn down, and Christian churches erected on the ruins. Soon, this “operation” became “legal”, ordered by the king – who made sure that there were no pagan temples built in his New Rome.

“The great Roman and Greek temples were – or so Eusebius said – broken open and their statues brought out, then mutilated”, writes Nixey. “Officials ‘scraped off the material which seemed to be usable, purifying it by smelting with fire’, then poured the precious metal into the public purse… Constantine, as his nephew the ‘apostate’ emperor, Julian,⁽⁷⁾ would scornfully say, was a ‘tyrant with the mind of a banker’… A market of plundered art developed and Christians… took to levering out and selling statues that were particularly valuable… The Greek poet Palladas archly observed, as he looked at a fine array of gods in the house of one wealthy Christian, that ‘the inhabitants of Olympus, having become Christians, live here undisturbed: for here, at least, they will escape the cauldron that melts them down for petty change’.”

• ⁽⁷⁾ Julian, the “Philosopher”, for the polytheists, the “Apostate”, for the monotheists, depending on the philosophic or religious ideas and priorities or prejudice of each value system…

But early Christians were neither “bankers”, nor wealthy merchants; they were ignorant people and idiots – including some emperors:

“As Julian acerbically observed, while Constantine robbed the temples, his sons overthrew them.” Nixey describes vividly how, “in a spasm of destruction never seen before… the Christian Church demolished, vandalized and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art… In Athens, a larger-than-life statue of Aphrodite has been disfigured by a crude cross carved on her brow; her eyes have been defaced and her nose is missing.⁽⁸⁾ In Cyrene, the eyes have been gouged out of a life-sized bust in a sanctuary of Demeter, and the nose removed; in Tuscany, a slender statue of Bacchus has been decapitated. In Sparta, a colossal statue of the goddess Hera looks blindly out, her eyes disfigured by crosses. A beautiful statue of Apollo from Salamis has been castrated and then struck, hard, in the face, shearing off the god’s nose. Across his neck are scars indicating that Christians attempted to decapitate him but failed… In Egypt, countless chisel blows neatly defaced… the images of the gods in the Dendera temple complex on the left bank of the Nile. Divine figures were attacked with tiny hack marks – usually several hundred for each figure… Eberhard Sauer, a specialist in the archaeology of religious hatred, has observed that the closeness of these cuts… hints at blows made with almost frantic rapidity.”

“Purified” head of an ancient Hellenic statue in Samos

• ⁽⁸⁾ “A naked statue of Aphrodite was, wrote one Christian historian in disgust, ‘more shameless than that of any prostitute standing in front of a brothel’… Far less easy to feel desire for a statue who has had a cross gouged in her head, her eyes blinded and her nose sliced from her face.” (C.N.)

“We will never know quite how much was wiped out. Statues were pulverized, shattered, scattered, burned and melted into absence… Others were so well disposed of that they will probably not be found: they were thrown into rivers, sewers and wells, never to be seen again… The sacred groves of the old gods… were set about with axes and their ancient trees hacked down… Moments of vandalism were immortalized in glowing terms in Christian hagiographies… Far more violence was buried by silence… While it might take months of effort, years of training and centuries of accumulated knowledge to build a Greek temple, it took little more than zeal and patience to destroy one… People built themselves houses from the stones of demolished temples… One law announced that the stones from these temples should be used to repair roads, bridges and aqueducts. In Constantinople, a former temple of Aphrodite was used to store a bureaucrat’s chariots… The desecration continued for centuries.”

● Let’s pick up the thread again. The king ordered the execution of the eunuch priests in Egypt, because they… “offended” his “morals”. The same fate awaited dozens of gentiles, pagans, who were considered as “sorcerers of the evil”, and responsible for the poor harvesting in 335. Among them was the philosopher Sopater of Apamea, a disciple of the Neoplatonist Iamblichus, despite the favour and personal friendship of Constantine he enjoyed. According to the Hellene historian and sophist Eunapius, the king was convinced by some adviser that, by magical arts, the pagan philosopher had… obstructed the arrival of a fleet laden with grain! Constantine’s son, Constantius II, a zealous Arian, also persecuted the seers, prophets, magicians, astrologers, and other diviners, for he feared he would be deprived of his throne by “spells”! The serpent of Judeo-Christian obscurantism had been hatched…⁽⁹⁾

• ⁽⁹⁾ As I commented in Chronicle 2, footnote 4, the Judaization of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds (in the Orient and Occident respectively) through Christianization was the precondition – sine qua non – of obscurantism during the Dark Ages.

● A Hellene, for the early Christian Church, was a gentile, a pagan; the word retained that meaning until the end of the millennium. The Greeks distinguished themselves from others according to cultural standards; the Jews did so according to religious standards. It is more than obvious what each people’s contribution to civilization and what their ideals have been. In his Epistles, Paul almost always juxtaposes Hellenes to Hebrews, in disregard of all other ethnicities (Romans, Syrians, Egyptians, etc.) living in the area at the time. It is more than obvious who he considered an enemy! Another “softer” interpretation is that a Hellene for him was a polytheist, while a Hebrew was a monotheist. Nota bene, a gentile is, first of all, a non-Jew (and not a non-Christian). The word Hellene meaning pagan has persisted into modern times. Many advocates of a revival of the Olympian gods’ worship call themselves Hellenic Polytheists, while the religion is called Hellenism. Such persons outside of Greece are careful not to imply that they consider themselves Greek nationals.

The Council of Gods, Raphael (1517-18)

● “The word ‘pagan’,” according to Nixey, “was a pejorative and insulting word… It was also a Christian innovation: before Christianity’s ascendancy few people would have thought to describe themselves by their religion at all. After Christianity, the world became split, forevermore, along religious boundaries; and words appeared to demarcate these divisions. One of the most common was ‘pagan’. Initially this word had been used to refer to a civilian rather than a soldier. Later, Christian writers concocted false, unflattering etymologies for it: they said it was related to the word pagus, to the ‘peasants’… It was not; but such slurs stuck and ‘paganism’ acquired an unappealing whiff of the rustic and the backward – a taint it carries to this day.”

Besides, the English writer thinks it is better to “avoid ascribing modern nationalities to ancient characters and instead describe them by the language they chiefly wrote in. Thus the orator Libanius, though he was born and lived in Syria, is described not as a ‘Syrian’ but as a Greek. This was a cosmopolitan world where anyone… might consider himself to be a ‘Hellene’ – a Greek”, she adds.

● Constantius was the emperor who initiated the anti-paganistic legislation that in time would become the basis of the Inquisition. He escalated persecutions, as well, setting up a concentration camp in Scythopolis, Palestine, where Hellenes, other gentiles and all those who were considered to be “enemies of the empire”, singled out by vile royal counselors, were tortured and killed. Relevant evidence is given by Ammianus Marcellinus – “a former officer and Hellene”, as he used to describe himself, even in those hard times, born perhaps in Antioch. The idea for the construction of the camp was attributed to to George of Cappadocia, bishop of Alexandria, whose end would be as bad as his life was, once Julian ascended the throne.

Victory column of Diocletian (erroneously mentioned as Pompey’s pillar) erected at the Serapeum in 297 CE after suppressing a revolt in Egypt. It’s a granite monolith 20.46 m high (total height 26.85 m.)

● 356. “It became illegal – on pain of death – to worship images”, observes Nixey. “‘Pagans’ began to be described as ‘madmen’ whose beliefs must be ‘completely eradicated’, while sacrifice was a ‘sin’ and anyone who performed such an evil would be ‘struck with the avenging sword’.” Christianism’s Orwellian Brave New World was in need of a surveillance network. “Roman emperors had always used informers – ‘delatores’. Now, they were put to the service of the Church. Men of all ranks were required to become informers… If they refused or failed in their duties, then they themselves would be held accountable. Among those whom the clergy were tasked with reporting on were actors, actresses and, as one revealing little law added, prostitutes ‘who wore monastic habits’. The punishments could be terrible… [e.g.] by having molten lead poured down [one’s] throat. Correction was paramount.” (!)

Julian: a Parenthesis of Hellenism

● February 4, 362. Julian promulgated an edict to guarantee freedom of religion, proclaiming that all religions were equal in front of the Law, and that the Roman Empire had to return to its former religious eclecticism, according to which it did not impose any religion. As a student of philosophy in Athens, the last emperor who consciously rejected Christianism, was initiated to the Eleusinian Mysteries, which he later tried to restore, and became acquainted with two future bishops and “saints”: Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea.

Julian (361–363) was a complex personality: “military commander, philosopher, theosophist, social reformer, and man of letters”, who wrote in Greek. Of course, several of his works have been “lost”; one of the most important of such “lost works” was his Against the Galileans (Christians). He was half-Hellene from his mother. His parents were Christians; he was given a Christian education. Yet, he converted from Christianism to Hellenism when he was 20. The emperor’s role did not suit him, as he disliked absolute autocracy. He considered the ideal ruler as being primus inter pares (“first among equals”), and equal before the law to his subjects. Julian often frequented in the Senate, participating in debates as a member, not as a king. His habit of talking to his subjects on an equal footing, dressing casually, and leading an ascetic lifestyle, were all misunderstood by “hoi polloi”, who thought that he should behave like an all-powerful Emperor.

Julian the Apostate Presiding at a Conference of Sectarians, by Edward Armitage (1875)
Julian the… Sectarian? But at that time, sectarians were the Christians!

He continually sought to reduce the burdensome and corrupt bureaucracy, and dismissed the surplus staff, either civic officials, or secret agents. He promoted decentralization for the same reason, transferring authorities to the cities from the capital. Of course, he repealed the stipends that Constantine had awarded to bishops, and removed the privileges of the Church, as well. He envisioned the institution of a philanthropic system, as the Christian charities were open to all, including pagans, and criticized the priests of the old religion: “These impious Galileans not only feed their own poor, but ours also; welcoming them into their agapae,⁽¹⁰⁾ they attract them, as children are attracted, with cakes.”

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ The agape (“love” in Greek) feast was a communal meal shared among early Christians.

After five months in Constantinople, he spent the next nine months in Antioch, preparing a campaign to Persia. He was disappointed a lot there, when he saw wealthy merchants hoarding food and selling it at high prices, with the situation heading for a famine. Despite his interventions, the curia and the city’s leading citizens did nothing. Finally, he fixed prices, and imported grain from Egypt; at the same time, he forced the landholders to sell. Then he tried to resurrect the ancient oracular spring of Castalia at a nearby temple of Apollo, where, however, a bishop had been buried. His order for the bones to be removed resulted to a massive Christian procession; shortly after, the temple was destroyed by fire. In 363, he ordered Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt: again, fires broke out and the works stopped. No need to say that in both cases, these fires were acts of sabotage by Christians, which could be described as “acts of terror”.

Mercurius killing Julian (Coptic icon). According to a “tradition”, Basil of Caesarea had been imprisoned at the start of Julian’s campaign. He prayed for help to Mercurius, who appeared in a vision, claiming to have speared Julian to death…

Julian was mortally wounded under mysterious circumstances during the Persian campaign, before he could implement his vision (“an act of God!”, the Christians would blissfully say, praising the “Lord”). But was it, indeed, “an act of God”? In 364, Libanius said that Julian was assassinated by a Christian soldier of his own army; but 14 years later, he… corrected himself, claiming that Julian was killed by a “Saracen” – though this turnaround happened in a period when the Christians were back in power. According to John Malalas, Basil of Caesarea commanded the assassination. Later Christian historians propagated the idea that Julian was killed by “saint” Mercurius. Considered apocryphal (Christian fantasy) is a report that his dying words were “νενίκηκάς με, Γαλιλαῖε!” (“You have won, Galilean!”). Julian would certainly speak in the plural: “You have won, Galileans!” (Compare his work Against the Galileans): there’s a big difference.

● As regards bishop George, according to Julian himself, Ammianus, as well as Christian historians, such as Sozomenus, Theodoret, or Socrates Scholasticus:

“George manifested his anti-pagan zeal in excess with arbitrary acts and insulting speeches, exacting onerous taxes, procuring the banishment of Zeno, a prominent pagan physician,⁽¹¹⁾ preventing the pagans from offering sacrifices and celebrating their gentile feasts, and bringing Artemius, duke of Egypt, whom the Alexandrians dreaded, for he was much given to the destruction of idols: he invaded with an armed force into the superb temple of Serapis [Serapeum], which was forthwith stripped of images, votive offerings, and ornaments… The news of Julian’s accession arrived at Alexandria on November 30, 361. George was at the height of his pride and power: he had persecuted and mocked the pagans, who now… felt that the gods could, at last, be avenged”… He was thrown into prison with two others who had overthrown a pagan altar; but “in the morning of December 24, the pagan mob again assembled, dragged them forth with horrible shouts of triumph, and kicked them to death.” Then they led the bodies through every part of the city and “eventually burned the remains on the shore, casting the ashes into the sea.” Alexandria, the glorious centre of Hellenistic civilization, was gradually sinking into the abyss…

• ⁽¹¹⁾ Everything Hellenic was “from the Devil”, as well, and banished: knowledge, science, medicine. Medical books were also burned and the only therapeutic methods left were blood-letting and… exorcism. Only dehumanized humans would never question the Christian “new order”…

St. George Killing the Dragon, by Bernat Martorell (1434-35): the same iconography, with a dragon
in the place of Julian!

● But who was that “duke of Egypt” (dux Aegypti), Artemius? For the Christians, he was none other than the “martyr” and “saint” Artemius of Antioch, where he was tried and beheaded in 362 for abuse of power and maladministration of his province, having demolished temples and broken down their idols – on his own will, or instigated by George. The Church apparently felt that his work was “God-blessed”! However, there’s a chance that in Julian’s years, we have not only one, but two “martyrs”: Artemius and George. The English historian Edward Gibbon e.g. identifies George of Cappadocia, the bishop, with… George of Lydda, the “saint”! The former was an Arian (i.e. a heretic), therefore, a “black sheep”. But the latter was the hero of a legend that, in several variations, fascinated even the Muslims. So, he should be preserved. The disinformation operation was thus put into motion (keep in mind that what information we have has passed through… a thousand censoring “sieves”)! George the “saint” was supposedly martyred in 303, during the Diocletian persecution. The technology of the era, however, did not allow a non-existent person to acquire flesh and bone. That’s why we know nothing about the “saint”, nor is there any proof that he ever existed. Whatever we know is according to… tradition. The oldest text referring to the legend, but without naming George, is Eusebius’ Church History in the 4th century (about his credibility, see Chronicle 19, last paragraph). The oldest text preserving fragments of the legend is in a Greek hagiography, a 5th-century palimpsest. But its compiler, just like Gibbon, also identifies the martyr with his namesake bishop.

● “As the early Christian author Origen admitted”, comments Nixey, “the numbers of martyrs were few enough to be easily countable; the Christians had died for their faith ‘occasionally’… Several saints appear never to have existed at all. It is now thought that fewer than ten martyrdom tales… can be considered reliable… There were few persecutions of those years: the Decian; the Valerian, seven years later, and ‘the Great [Diocletian] Persecution’ fifty-odd years after that in AD 303. And not all of these ‘persecutions’ were intended to explicitly target Christians… The Romans did not seek to wipe Christianity out. If they had, they would almost certainly have succeeded… The martyr stories… show what the scholar G. E. M. de Ste. Croix called ‘an increasing contempt for historicity’… The brief and sporadic Roman persecutions of Christians would pale in comparison to what the Christians inflicted on others – not to mention on their own heretics.”

● 363. When Julian was dead, the “purple” (the “crown”, as they used to say of later kings) was given, due to a “misunderstanding”, to Jovian, who established Christianism again as the official religion. Being under the influence of “saint” Athanasius of Alexandria, he moved “as if by magic” from tolerance to bigotry, subjecting those who worshipped ancestral gods to death and also ordering the Library of Antioch to be burned down.⁽¹²⁾ However, he was unable to complete his “mission”: he died (or… they made him die) half a year later. Very soon this task would be undertaken by Theodosius I.

A Greek rider seizes a mounted Amazon (armed with a double-headed axe) by her Phrygian cap; mosaic, 2nd half of the 4th century CE
(in the time of Jovian); from Daphne, a suburb of Antioch.

• ⁽¹³⁾ “Jovian ordered the destruction” of the Library of Antioch, relates Johannes Hahn in his Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt (Violence and religious conflict), “because he wanted to gain the favour of the Antiochians. Nevertheless, he failed completely: not only the pagans but also the Christians interpreted this as a barbaric act… He burned the temple, with all the books in it, at the urging of his wife, with his concubines laughing and setting the fire”…

● The “witch-hunt”, in the meantime, continued with even greater intensity, after Julian’s short reign: Hellenic philosophical and scientific treatises were burned in public, and hundreds of Greeks or other pagans, accused of sorcery, were being pilloried, imprisoned, tortured, executed, and their properties were confiscated. Among them was another philosopher, Simonides. Such accusations arose from the practice of theurgy, performed by Neoplatonic philosophers. It was “man’s conscious participation in the divine work,” which was accomplished by rituals, invoking god, or gods, with the goal of achieving henosis (union with the divine) and perfecting oneself. It is what the mystics, such as the Sufis, are after until now, with rituals using music and poetry, singing and dancing – and what the people of the Church detest until now.

● In 364, Maximus, Julian’s instructor in philosophy and theurgy, was accused of causing a lengthy illness in the new emperors, Valentinian and Valens, but was acquitted due to lack of evidence. In 365-366, however, he was again arrested for illegitimate enrichment. A heavy fine was imposed and he was tortured since he was not able to pay… Around 370, his name was implicated in some rumours about an oracle on who the next emperor would be. Valens reacted hysterically, unleashing a massacre, and as a result, he was loathed by his subjects. Maximus was tortured and beheaded in 372, although, according to Eunapius, he had no involvement in this plot.

St. Paul and the burning of pagan books at Ephesus, by Lucio Massari (1612). Acts of the Apostles, 19: “Τhey counted the value of [the burned books] and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver” = more than 20 million €!

● 4th century, 3rd quarter. “One of the most infamous assaults on thinkers and books took place in Antioch… Ammianus Marcellinus… one of the finest historians of the era, happened to be there. An accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals… A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments’ was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded. ‘Innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence… Throughout the eastern provinces whole libraries were burnt by their owners for fear of a similar fate; such was the terror which seized all hearts’… As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings ‘of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated’.” Catherine Nixey sums up with the most tragic consequence: “It has been estimated that less than 10% of all classical literature has survived into the modern era.”

Omphalos of Gaea (navel of the Earth): Delphi with the Temple of Apollo (reconstruction)

Theodosius: Genocide Act IΙ – Massacre of Thessalonica
Christian Vandals in Delphi

● 390. Another “miraculous” metamorphosis was witnessed on Theodosius (379–395). His policy of tolerance in the beginning of his reign gave way to bigotry. The bloody turning point came with his order to his Gothic troops to commit the abominable massacre of Thessalonica in the Hippodrome in 390, when the citizens rebelled against his Germanic mercenary garrison (see Chronicle 18, footnote 5). The people had been invited to watch chariot races; but the Goths closed the gates and slaughtered everyone. The result: 7,000-15,000 Thessalonians killed. Ambrose, the archbishop of Milan, was quick to capitalize on this golden opportunity: he excommunicated Theodosius, and thereby turned him into his obedient instrument.⁽¹³⁾ The king submitted himself completely to the Church, and agreed to do public penance, adopting a new role as the champion of the Christian faith. The result was the so-called “Theodosian decrees”, breaking up pagan institutions and destroying their temples. The first act of his “penance” was perhaps the ruination of the temple of Apollo and most of the statues and works of art in Delphi, in the name of Christianism, in the same year (390).⁽¹⁴⁾ The sacred site was totally destroyed by Christian zealots in an attempt to obliterate all traces of Hellenism, which was already proscribed, a “religio illicit”: gentiles would be sought out by Christian informers, brought to court and in many cases executed. This “war on the infidels” was transferred to Alexandria the next year.

• ⁽¹³⁾ Ambrose could manipulate three emperors: Gratian, Valentinian II, and Theodosius I; naturally, he was “sanctified”! Adopting Constantine’s tactics, Gratian in 382 confiscated every paganist property. Valentinian’s legislation practically outlawed polytheism. Theodosius’ decrees were effectively a declaration of war on Hellenism. He not only authorized, but also participated in Christian zealots’ attacks against ancient shrines, when priests were killed and temples destroyed.

Aphrodite: clay figurine from Myrina
(2nd century BCE)

• ⁽¹⁴⁾ In fact, Delphi was already in a desolate state, with its treasures plundered and shattered: the oracle was visited by Oribasius, Julian’s personal physician, in 362, on behalf of the emperor, and received one of Pythia’s last “prophecies” (or, rather the cry: “Help!”). At least, that’s what the Christian historian Philostorgius says, but we ignore if it is a fact, or another case of falsified truth, of “history” written by the Big Brothers:

  .

  Tell the emperor,

  the splendid palace fell to the ground.

  Phoebus no longer has a house,

  nor the prophesying laurel,

  nor the speaking spring;

  the speaking water evaporated as well.

● 391. “Theodosius passed a formidable law. ‘No person shall be granted the right to perform sacrifices; no person shall go around the temples; no person shall revere the shrines’. Nor could anyone… venerate his household gods, or burn lights, put up wreaths, or burn incense to them. Then… a new and more terrible law came. ‘If there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down’… A bishop named Marcellus became ‘the first… to put the edict in force and destroy the shrines’… As the laws against pagans were building to an aggressive crescendo, [he also] destroyed the vast and still hugely popular temple of Zeus at Apamea… It fell with a crash that was loud enough to bring all the townspeople running… Marcellus [at last] was seized and burned alive by outraged polytheists… Today he is worshipped as a saint in the Orthodox Church.” No one could ever imagine what building would be the Christians’ next target. Catherine Nixey’s narrative builds up to a climax:

Serapeum of Alexandria (reconstructed)

● “At the end of the first century of Christian rule, the Colosseum dominated Rome and the Parthenon towered above Athens. Yet when writers of this period discuss architecture, these aren’t the buildings that impress them. Instead, their admiration is drawn by another structure in Egypt [despite destruction inflicted by Artemius]. Its great halls, its columns, its astonishing statues and its art all made it… ‘the most magnificent building in the whole world’. Everyone had heard of it. No one has heard of it now. While tourists still toil up to the Parthenon, or look in awe at the Colosseum, outside Academia few people know of the temple of Serapis.⁽¹⁵⁾ That is because… a bishop, supported by a band of fanatical Christians, reduced it to rubble.”

• ⁽¹⁵⁾ It is astonishing that none of these edifices (Parthenon, Colosseum, Serapeum) was included among the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World!

The Serapeum and Artemision Razed to the Ground

● In 391, the enormous Serapeum, together with what was left out of the great Library of Alexandria, were looted, burned and razed to the ground by Christian fanatics and troops, at the decrees of Theodosius and archbishop Theophilus, whom Edward Gibbon describes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as “the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.” The archbishop had discovered an underground Mithraeum,⁽¹⁶⁾ and together with his followers, mockingly displayed the worshippers’ sacred artifacts offending them enough to provoke an attack on Christians. The latter counterattacked, forcing the Mithraists to retreat to the Serapeum. Theodosius had given Theophilus the go-ahead to destroy, and just asked him to avoid another massacre. As the Christian historiographer, Socrates Scholasticus says in his Ecclesiastical History, Theophilus “caused the Mithraeum to be cleaned out… Then he destroyed the Serapeum… The heathen temples were therefore razed to the ground, and the images of their gods molten into pots and other convenient utensils for the use of the Alexandrian Church.” The temples that were demolished could be declared “abandoned”, as Theophilus immediately noted in applying for permission to convert them into Christian churches – an act that must have received general sanction, for cave-like mithraea turned into crypts, and temples forming the foundations of churches, appear throughout the Roman Empire in the 5th century.

• ⁽¹⁶⁾ Note that we know almost nothing about Mithraism, a religion contemporary with – and rival of – Christianism, practiced from about the 1st to the 4th centuries CE.

5th-century scroll: Theophilus standing triumphantly on the ruins of Serapeum: his eyes betray his paranoia…

● Standing triumphantly in the ruins, Theophilus looked around in search of his next victim and, after he razed to the ground numerous shrines all over Egypt, turned against the followers of Origen, embarking on a paranoid campaign that killed 10,000 monks: the massacre was unavoidable after all… Nevertheless, the slaughterer is considered a “saint” by the Copts!

“According to later Christian chronicles”, notes Nixey, Serapeum’s devastation “was a victory. According to a non-Christian account, it was a tragedy – and a farce. The Greek writer Eunapius felt the destruction was done less from reverence for the Lord than out of pure greed. In his account the Christians weren’t virtuous warriors: they were hoodlums and thieves. The only thing that they did not steal, he observed acidly, was the floor – and that was left ‘simply because of the weight of the stones which were not easy to move’… The tens of thousands of books, the remnants of the greatest library in the world,⁽¹⁷⁾ were all lost, never to reappear. Perhaps they were burned. As the modern scholar, Luciano Canfora, observed: ‘the burning of books was part of the advent and imposition of Christianity’.”

• ⁽¹⁷⁾ “It was over a millennium before any other library would ever come close to its holdings.” (C.N.) On the devastation of the Alexandrian Library, see Chronicle 18, footnote 6, and Chronicle 24, Arsons of Libraries.

● The destruction of the Serapeum was seen by many authors as representative of the “triumph of Christianity” over other religions – or the victory of a Hebrew god over Hellenic, Roman, Egyptian, Persian, etc., deities – hence other cultures; while that of the Alexandrian Library symbolized “knowledge and culture ruined”. The library held almost 700,000 scrolls from Hellas, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, India, and several other countries, being part of a grand research institute, an ancient university, called the Musaeum (House of the Muses), where many of the most famous thinkers of the ancient world studied and worked, such as: Archimedes, antiquity’s greatest scientist; Ctesibius, the father of pneumatics and inventor of the hydraulis (water organ, or today’s pipe organ; see Chronicle 11, Hydraulis, Pipe Organ); Euclid, the father of geometry; Eratosthenes, who argued for a spherical earth, calculated its circumference, and the tilt of its axis, to near-accuracy; Hero, the father of mechanics, inventor of the first steam engine (aeolipile), a follower of the Atomists; Hipparchus, the father of astronomy and founder of trigonometry; Aristarchus, who proposed the first heliocentric system of the universe; his case is an excellent example: his only extant work, On Sizes and Distances of the Sun and the Moon, is based on the geocentric model; the other book that proposed the alternative hypothesis of heliocentrism is known only through citations by other scientists, such as Archimedes. Is this just a coincidence? Absolutely not!

Library of Alexandria (reconstructed)

● In 392, Theodosius banned the mysteries of Aphrodite in Cyprus, while “saint” Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, Christianized gentiles en masse with the threat of slaughter and fire, destroying all sanctuaries. The next year, the king extended the ban to all Pan-Hellenic artistic and athletic festivals and games, such as the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, and also the Roman Actia. Given the opportunity, the sanctuaries in Olympia were plundered. In 395, Christian atrocities spread all over Greece, including symbolic sites – not only Olympia, but also Dion, Delphi (again), and Eleusis, where the ancient sanctuary was set to fire and all priests were killed because they had tried to revive the Eleusinian Mysteries.

● Violence reigned supreme during the late 4th century, with ancient temples destroyed and turned into Christian churches, their statues, altars, sanctuaries, carried around and mocked in public before they were shattered, gentile priests killed, and libraries burned. Surviving texts describe this widespread catastrophe in the Orient and Occident, referring among others to: the devastation of holy sites that extended rapidly throughout Egypt; the leveling of all temples in Gaza; the destruction of temples and idols in Syria and around Carthage; the attacks of Martin of Tours on holy sites in Gaul; and the list goes on…

The destruction of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia was ordered by Theodosius II in 426 CE

“In France”, writes Nixey, “St Martin, or so the Life of Martin proudly records, ‘set fire to a most ancient and famous shrine’ before moving on to a different village where he ‘completely demolished the temple… and reduced all the altars and statues to dust’. Hagiography records such attacks not as dismal… acts of vandalism but proof of a saint’s virtue. Some of the most famous saints in Christianity kicked off their careers… demolishing shrines. Benedict of Nursia… was celebrated as a destroyer of antiquities. Upon arriving in Monte Cassino, just outside Rome, he smashed an ancient statue of Apollo and destroyed the shrine’s altar. He toured the area ‘pulling down the idols and destroying the groves on the mountain… and gave himself no rest until he had uprooted the last remnant of heathenism’… John Chrysostom, hearing that Phoenicia was still ‘suffering from the madness of the demons’ rites’, sent violent bands of monks, funded by the faithful women of his congregation, to destroy the shrines in the area… In AD 401, Augustine told Christians in Carthage to smash pagan objects because that was what God wanted and commanded… His congregation, eager to sack the temples, started reciting Psalm 83. ‘Let them be humiliated and downcast forever. Let them perish in disgrace’… It has been said that 60 died in riots inflamed by this burst of oratorical fire.” It was an undeclared war.⁽¹⁸⁾

The Sack of Rome by the [Christian] Barbarians
in 410, by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre (1890)

• ⁽¹⁸⁾ Centuries of brainwashing created the false impression that Christianism fell like a “ripe fruit”, in a society tired of polytheism, where everyone embraced the new religion. Eusebius mentions street-fighting in Alexandria between Christians and polytheists, occurring as early as the mid-3rd century. A little later, early in the 4th century, “Spanish bishops were moved to declare that: ‘If anyone breaks idols and is killed on the spot’ he would not… be awarded the martyr’s crown”, as Catherine Nixey notes.

This peculiar civil war forced many people to convert to Christianism, but secretly they remained polytheists. Some had the courage to “apostasize”, just like Julian, adopting Hellenism again. It was the reason why laws against “apostasy” were promulgated by Gratian and Theodosius, with the penalties getting heavier and heavier. Polytheist writers blamed the Christian hegemony for all the evils of the empire, such as the Sack of Rome, in 410, by Alaric. Certainly, these books, and all similar writings, were destroyed by the Christians, who threatened to cut off the hands of anyone who dared to make copies of such “banned” literature.

● Alaric and his Goths were Christians (Arians), while the sack of Rome was the beginning of the end for the Western Roman Empire.

“The orator Libanius… and other worshippers of the old gods saw… their temples ‘in ruins, their ritual banned, their altars overturned, their sacrifices suppressed, their priests sent packing and their property divided up between a crew of rascals’… The vicious and thuggish attacks on the temples weren’t done out of piety, said Libanius [echoing Eunapius]. They committed them out of pure greed… ‘These attacks are a source of income’ because after raiding not only shrines but also peasant homes, ‘the invaders depart with the loot from the places they have stormed’.”

Saul of Tarsus, the trouble-maker: his preaching and book burning at Ephesus inspired many artists who applauded such actions that all fascists imitated. Here’s another version: The Story
of St. Paul: The Burning of the Books at Ephesus, by Pieter Coecke van Aelst (tapestry, detail: designed c. 1529, woven before 1546)

● A fundamentalist mob, led by “Chrysostom”, destroyed completely the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of antiquity, in 401, ten years after its closure. Its ruins were used to decorate the Hagia Sophia (columns), the Senate (bronze gates), the palace, and other buildings of Constantinople. A first verbal attack on the temple by Saul-Paul caused a violent riot. Destructions by the Christians started at the end of the 1st century. The “baton” was later taken by the Christian Goths who plundered Artemision in 262 CE. Archaeologists had been searching for six years before they located its traces in 1869.

● The impression one gets on this first “Christian century” is that Julian’s failure to restore freedom of religion was a turning point: the Christians realized what they had achieved and what they were in danger of losing. Their attacks would then reach proportions of an annihilation of all non-Christians, a true genocide – to a paroxysmal point.

●

Reconstruction of the procession carrying Alexander’s body based on Diodorus’ description

Sacrilege of Alexander’s Sōma

IN THIS ATMOSPHERE OF CHAOS AND POLARIZATION, utmost decay and moral degradation, proclaimed as “the triumph of Christianity over idolatry”, the symbolism of a “Victorious Jesus” could not be overwhelming without the “defeat” and “conquest” of the invincible conqueror, Alexander the Great. The king died (probably poisoned) in Babylon in 323 BCE. His body was en route to Macedonia, when it was hijacked by Ptolemy Soter for the prestige of having Alexander’s tomb in Egypt. The deceased, who had been declared as “the son of Amun” by the god’s oracle at Siwa oasis, asked shortly before his death to be buried there, in the temple of Zeus Amun, rather than alongside his biological father, Philip, at Aegae. Ptolemy Philopator built a magnificent mausoleum in Alexandria, inside a huge precinct, known as Sōma (Body), which became one of the most famous and sacred sanctuaries of the ancient world, for Alexander was worshipped as a god in the Macedonian and the Roman Empires – especially in the city he had founded, where he was like a patron. A large number of rulers and politicians, officers and officials, both Hellenes and Romans, paid respects to Alexander visiting the mausoleum. Julius Caesar was the first Roman leader to go to the Sōma, as a pilgrimage to the grave of his hero. Many others followed, from Augustus to Severus. However, there were some sacrilegious villains, like Caligula, who removed the breastplate, and Caracalla, who took the tunic, ring, and belt, while his troops were looting Alexandria for several days, slaughtering over 20,000 citizens, mainly young people, in 215, because of a satire produced in the city mocking his claims that he had killed his brother, co-emperor Geta, in self-defense.

City plan of ancient Alexandria with the four flashpoints framed in red: the Musaeum and the
Library, the Serapeum, and somewhere between the “Sōma”, the tomb of Alexander

● Nevertheless, even in such a bloodbath and plunder, with the sole exception of those “pickpockets” wearing the imperial purple, there was no real threat to Alexander’s Sōma until the next century. Ammianus Marcellinus described how bishop George, passing by the Sōma, in 361, wondered intentionally aloud in front of the people of Alexandria about the great and magnificent temple of the city’s genius: “How long will this tomb stand?”, he asked. By “genius”, Ammianus meant the tutelary deity of the city, Alexander. After a while, as we have seen, “George was killed for repeated acts of pointed outrage, insult, and pillage of the most sacred treasures of the city.” Besides, he was hated by all, pagans and Christians alike. But George was not alone. Theodosius, in 391, declared illegal the veneration of Alexander, together with all other pagan gods, and afterwards, says Alexandre Grandazzi in his Historia, “a violent Christian and anti-pagan riot exploded leading to the destruction of the great temple of Serapis, and possibly reached… the Sōma: an allusion… in a speech by the orator Libanius indicates that the body was removed from the tomb to be exposed publicly for the last time.” It seems that the body was hijacked again, and buried in a Christian manner since, according to the new dogma, it should be interred, while the preceding practice of entombment was thought to be idolatrous. Everything referring to Hellenism was destroyed, while the burial of important, illustrious persons was no longer done in mausoleums, but in Christian basilicas and underground. It is the time when Alexander’s remains “mysteriously” vanish. Already at the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries, John “Chrysostom” boasted in a sermon that the Macedonian king’s tomb was “unknown to his own people”, i.e. to the Alexandrian polytheists. Some decades later, Alexander was included by Theodoret in his list of famous personages whose graves had been “lost”.

Alexander the Great, several versions, by Andy Warhol (1982)

● There are a couple of references to a mosque or tomb of Alexander in Arabic texts dating from the 9th and 10th centuries. They probably allude to a mosque that was reconstructed from ancient architectural elements in the 11th century. Alexander’s empty sarcophagus was found there by Napoleon’s forces in 1798. Leo Africanus, who visited Alexandria around 1517, wrote:

“In the midst of the ruins of Alexandria, there still remains a small edifice, built like a chapel, worthy of notice on account of a remarkable tomb held in high honour by the Mohammedans; in which sepulchre, they assert, is preserved the body of Alexander the Great… An immense crowd of strangers come thither, even from distant countries, for the sake of worshipping and doing homage to the tomb, on which they likewise frequently bestow considerable donations.”

Alexander the Great, mosaic,
by Alexandros Giannios

George Sandys, visiting Alexandria in 1611, was also shown a sepulchre venerated as Alexander’s resting place. Whatever the fate of the tomb that was “mysteriously lost” again, these testimonies constitute a double defeat over Christianism: a) Alexander’s veneration continued either with or even without his body, despite the sacrilege; b) a comparison between the two monotheistic religions here ends up overwhelmingly against Christianism.

● According to 21st century historians, such as Andrew Chugg, author of four books on Alexander, one entitled Alexander the Great, the Lost Tomb, there’s a chance that the embalmed body of the great Macedonian king might be preserved in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, where it has been mistakenly venerated as the body of Mark the Evangelist! The latter had gone to Alexandria in 49, and founded the Church there, becoming its first bishop. However, there were Alexandrian pagans who resented his efforts to turn them away from the worship of their traditional gods. So, in 68, they placed a rope around his neck and dragged him through the streets until he died (the mobs, you see, were not a Christian invention: they have been an essential and indispensable “tool” of every ideology and doctrine).

Two Venetian merchants brought the mummy from Muslim Alexandria to Venice in the 9th century, and the doge ordered the so-called Chiesa d’Oro (Church of Gold) to be built next to his palace. The possession of an important relic would have serious political consequences. With a supposed evangelist on its territory, Venice acquired a status almost equal to that of Rome. During the construction of a new basilica in 1063, the relics “mysteriously” disappeared. According to a tradition, “Mark” himself revealed the location of his remains in 1094 by extending his arm from a pillar to the doge of the time.

Since 1811, the mummy rests in a crypt under the church’s altar, inside a marble sarcophagus on which there are also several Macedonian symbols. On the contrary, the Copts believe that Mark’s head remains in a church named after him in Alexandria, parts of his relics are in St. Mark’s Cairo Cathedral, and the rest are in Venice.

Nevertheless, there’s just one “little detail”: early Christian writers, such as Dorotheus, Eutychius, and also the author of the Chronicón Paschale, say that Mark’s body was burned by the pagans! How could it be possibly embalmed?

A scientific study on the remains would reveal the secret of their origin. Radiocarbon dating would establish if the body is old enough to match to that of Alexander. And, it would be possible to reconstruct his facial features from the skull (wherever it is), and inspect the bones for signs of multiple injuries, particularly the one inflicted on Alexander’s chest when an arrow penetrated into his sternum…

Do you sincerely think there will be any Church officials who would ever allow such a study, putting at risk the Church’s “history” for History’s sake?

• >> Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM
• << Chronicle 22. AN IBERIAN PERIPLUS REVIVAL

Next Chronicle 24. THE TRIUMPH OF CRETINISM ● The Genocide of the Hellenes (Β) ● Hypatia’s Assassination ● Christianism and Slavery ● Colonialism and Racism

Ruins and Columns of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus

Chronicle 16. MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS-PARAPLUS

II. CASSITERIDES ARCHIPELAGO

Sailing to Tartessos

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Chronicle 16. MEDITERRANEAN PERIPLUS-PARAPLUS

/ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ/ Χρονικό 16. ΜΕΣΟΓΕΙΟΥ ΠΑΡΑΠΛΟΥΣ-ΠΕΡΙΠΛΟΥΣ

● Periplus: Circumnavigation or Log ● Navigators and Intellectuals
● The Peloponnesian War and Euripides ● Nomos (Law Song)

Michales Loukovikas

WHAT WAS THE MOTIVE BEHIND MAN’S decision to take his chances and go out to sea? As always, he had needs to satisfy: he initially was in search of a better place to live. After settling down, his needs changed: there was much food in the sea and he could certainly fish far better with a canoe or a boat. The more he familiarized himself with the sea, the further he went out there, and thus the vessel also became a means of transport. Men started exchanging goods and, as long as production increased, all these boatmen were divided into fishermen and traders – and sea warriors, as well. Commerce developed in parallel with navigation. As a rule, a sea trader was obliged to take notes and map out his routes. This notebook gradually developed into

P E R I P L U S

Ancient Greek pottery (cylix) depicting
merchant ships and warships

“PERIPLUS” is the Latin form of the Hellenic word περίπλους, a “sailing-around”. The word also developed specialized meanings; one of them became a term in the navigation of Greeks and other peoples. Such a periplus was a manuscript listing – in order and with approximate intervening distances – the ports and coastal landmarks that the captain of a vessel would see along a shore.⁽¹⁾ It served the same purpose as the Roman itinerarium, i.e. a map of road stops. If the navigators were skilled geographers (as many were), they added various notes, contributing to the geographical knowledge of the time. In that sense the periplus was a type of log. We can have an idea about such ancient logs from the earliest Hellene historian, Hecataeus of Miletus. The Histories by Herodotus and Thucydides contain passages that appear to have been based on such peripli, as well.

• ⁽¹⁾ Before the nautical charts, the primary store of geographic information for maritime navigation (a mariner’s handbook of written sailing directions) was known in antiquity as a periplus; later, in medieval Italy and the Mediterranean, it was substituted by a portolano. Portuguese navigators in 16th century called it roteiro, the Spaniards derroterro, the French routier, the English rutter, the Dutch leeskarte, and the Germans Seebuch. Portulano in Italian means “related to harbours”.

● A paraplus is similar to a periplus, meaning “sailing by (the coast)”.

● A periplus was also an ancient naval manoeuvre in which attacking triremes would outflank or encircle the defenders in order to strike them in the rear.

The map of Hecataeus

● The Milesian Hecataeus (Ἑκαταῖος, c. 550 – c. 476 BCE) lived in the time of the Persian invasion. Having travelled extensively, he settled in his native city devoting his time to the composition of geographical and historical works. He is the first Greek historian to mention the Celts. He is credited with a work written in two books and entitled Γῆς περίοδος (World Survey, or Travels Round the Earth). Each book is organized like a periplus, a point-to-point coastal survey. One, on Europe, was like a Mediterranean periplus, describing each region in turn, and reaching as far north as Scythia. The other, on Asia, was similar to the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, giving information on the countries and inhabitants of this area, the account of Egypt being particularly comprehensive. It was accompanied by a corrected and enlarged version of Anaximander’s map of the Earth.⁽²⁾ This work survives only in fragments, mainly in Ethnica, the geographical lexicon compiled by Stephanus of Byzantium (6th century CE). Another work of Hecataeus was the Genealogiae, a systematized account of the Hellenic legends and myths, where he breaks with the epic myth-making tradition. The extant fragments are just enough to show what we are missing.

The map of Anaximander

• ⁽²⁾ Anaximander (Ἀναξίμανδρος, c. 610 – c. 546 BCE), a pre-Socratic philosopher, succeeded his master, Thales, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, as head of the Milesian school, where among his pupils he counted Anaximenes and, arguably, Pythagoras. He is the first philosopher known to have written down his studies, although only one fragment of his work remains. He was an early proponent of science trying to observe and explain different aspects of the universe, with a particular interest in its origins. In astronomy, he tried to describe the mechanics of the celestial bodies in relation to the Earth. In physics, his idea that the ἄπειρον (infinite) was the source of all things led Hellenic philosophy to a new level of conceptual abstraction. He created a map of the world and contributed greatly to the advancement of geography. According to Carl Sagan, he conducted the earliest recorded scientific experiment.

The world according to Herodotus

● Herodotus (Ἡρόδοτος, c. 484 – c. 425 BCE), born in Halicarnassus, is regarded as the “Father of History”. He was the first historian known to systematically collect his material, test its accuracy to a certain extent and arrange it in a well-constructed and vivid narrative. His celebrated Histories were a record of his Inquiries into the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars that culminated in 490–479 BCE. He describes in detail that period, which would otherwise be poorly documented – adding numerous long digressions about the various places and people he encountered during his wide-and-long-ranging travels around the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and beyond.

Fragment from the Histories (VIII, Urania) on Papyrus Oxyrhynchus (early 2nd century CE)

Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος Ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι, τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται. (Herodotus of Halicarnassus’ Inquiries are here set down to preserve the memory of the past by putting on record the astonishing achievements both of our own and of other peoples).

It was rather conventional at that time for authors to have their works “published” by reciting them at popular festivals. Herodotus took his Histories to Olympia, in the Olympian Games, and presented his entire work (9 books) to the assembled people in one sitting, receiving rapturous applause at the end. Others, nevertheless, said he refused to start reading until some clouds offered him a bit of shade, by which time, however, the assembly had dispersed – hence the proverbial expression “Herodotus and his shade” to describe anyone who misses his opportunity through delay.

● The Athenian Thucydides (Θουκυδίδης, c. 460 – c. 395 BCE) is the notable author of the History of the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens (431–404 BCE) to the year 411. Its finale is recounted by Xenophon in his Hellenica. Thucydides is regarded as the father of “scientific history” due to his strict standards of evidence-gathering and analysis in terms of cause and effect without reference to intervention by the gods. He has also been called as the father of the school of political realism, which views the relations between nations as based on might rather than right. His Melian dialogue still remains a seminal work of international relations theory.⁽³⁾

• ⁽³⁾ The Melian dialogue is the account of a confrontation between Athens and Melos, a neutral island in the southern Aegean, east of the Peloponnese, in 416-415 BCΕ, during the Peloponnesian War. Athens wanted to conquer Melos to intimidate Sparta. The confrontation ended in tragedy: the Athenians executed all captive men and enslaved women and children…

● Melos was an important source of obsidian, a valuable volcanic material in the Neolithic era, to make cutting and piercing tools.

Venus de Milo, or Aphrodite of Melos (130-100 BCE)

● However, the island is famous all over the world because of a work of art that was found there: it is the celebrated statue of Aphrodite of Melos, better known as Venus de Milo. It was abducted by the French, supported by the Ottomans still occupying Hellas (1820), during clashes, at Melos and Piraeus harbours, that left more than 200 Greeks dead!

The Peloponnesian War, after the glorious end of the Persian Wars, marked the dramatic finale to the Golden Age of Hellenic civilization.

● In the first phase of the war Sparta launched invasions of Attica, and Athens raided the Peloponnesian coast, taking advantage of its naval supremacy. The Athenians sent later a huge expeditionary force to attack Syracuse in Sicily failing disastrously. This ushered in the final phase of the war, when Sparta, already receiving support from Persia, incited rebellions in the Athenians’ subject states in the Aegean and Asia Minor, undermining their hegemony. The destruction of their fleet put an end to the war and Athens surrendered in the next year. This Greek “civil war”,⁽⁴⁾ a few years after the glorious end of the Median (Persian) Wars (499–449 BCΕ), reshaped the ancient Hellenic world. Athens, the strongest polis in Greece prior to the war’s beginning, was reduced to almost complete subjection, while Sparta became established as the leading power. However, the economic costs of the war were felt all across Hellas; poverty became widespread in the Peloponnese, while Athens, totally devastated, would never recover its pre-war prosperity. The war also wrought subtler changes to Grecian society; the antagonism between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta, each of which supported friendly political factions within other poleis, made civil war a common occurrence in Hellas. Greek warfare, originally on a limited scale, was transformed into an all-out struggle between city-states, complete with large-scale atrocities. Shattering religious and cultural taboos, devastating whole cities and the countryside, this civil war marked the dramatic finale to the 5th century BCΕ and the Golden Age of Hellenic civilization.

• ⁽⁴⁾ The Peloponnesian War was ἐμφύλιος in the Greek sense of the word: not just a civil war, but a war within the “phylum” of the Hellenes.

During celebrations for victory, someone sang a song of Euripides.
The Spartans were so moved they changed their minds: “They felt it
would be barbarous to annihilate Athens that produced such men.”

Euripides, by Sebastià Giralt

● The Peloponnesian War is the background of a didactic story on music and politics centered on Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE) – perhaps the best of the Greek tragedians. He was also musically avant-garde, working with the most experimental musicians – a fact exploited by conservatives, such as Aristophanes, in order to ridicule him. Yet, it was Euripides’ music (and not that by Aristophanes, neither by Aeschylus, nor by Sophocles) that saved many Athenians, and Athens itself, during the war. Since then, and for many centuries to come, people used to sing the best odes of tragedies (we can say “arias” in operatic terminology). Hence, the modern Greek word for “song” (“τραγούδι”) originates from the word of “tragedy” (τραγῳδία). After the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily, many Athenians held captives there saved their lives as they were able to sing songs of Euripides. And at the end of the war, the victorious Spartan generals had a meeting to decide the fate of Athens. They concluded that the city should be demolished and its citizens enslaved. Then, during a banquet to celebrate victory, someone sang an ode from Euripides’ Electra. The generals were so much moved that they changed their minds: “They felt it would be a barbarous act to annihilate a city that produced such men”! These generals, needless to say, could appreciate the music of Euripides thanks to their culture.⁽⁵⁾ A most celebrated song in the ears of today’s generals or politicians would have no effect whatsoever… (These episodes are from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives – those of Nicias and Lysander).

• ⁽⁵⁾ Indeed, it’s very impressive that at that time, the most popular songs were avant-garde! It goes without saying that the citizens’ cultural level was very high…

Pytheas of Massalia: the greatest navigating explorer of the era with his periplus of Europe

A “Periplus” made of stone and the first one around Africa

JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, merchant shipping started in… “our own Orient” (it’s time for me to be sarcastic with this cliché! See Chronicle 6, footnote 1). The available data lead us to Egypt. Very soon the initiative passed to some sea peoples (Carians, Cretans, Greeks, Phoenicians, etc.), for the Egyptians, as a land people, were prone to agriculture. The Mediterranean, a closed sea with many islands, was in fact ideal for… sailing courses – the Aegean even more! Periplus as a log appeared with long-distance navigation, which is unthinkable without such a log. A captain kept his notes in any script, even… stenographic scribble, he could manage. It was impossible to memorize everything, and he could not impart his expertise to others.

● Hannu (Hennu, or Henenu), serving under Mentuhotep III (late 21st century BCE) re-opened the old trade routes to the land of Punt (in the Horn of Africa) and “Libya” – i.e. Africa beyond the Nile (the Maghreb). Hannu set out as head of 3000 soldiers, crossed the mountainous desert via Wadi Hammamat (“Valley of Many Baths”) and went on to the coast of the Red Sea. He wrote of his expedition on stone, on a rock-inscription in the same valley (therefore, his “Periplus” was made of stone):

Boat of Khonsu, the Egyptian god of the Moon

“I was sent to conduct ships to the land of Punt, to fetch for Pharaoh sweet-smelling spices… I reached the Great Green [i.e. the sea]. Then I made the ships and dispatched them with all manner of things and made for them a great oblation of cattle, oxen and gazelles. When I returned from the Great Green… I brought for His Majesty every product that I found on the shores of God’s Land; [… and also] splendid blocks of stone for the temple statues.”

Hannu’s road was the one used in the time of the Ptolemies and Romans; it led from Coptos to Leucos Limen (White Harbour, now Qoseir) on the Red Sea. It’s the same commercial thoroughfare of merchants of all countries, who traded in the wonderful products of Arabia and India, and thus turned into a bridge of all nations, which of old united Asia and Europe. Hannu is the first eponymous explorer. Coming back to Egypt, he brought precious treasures, e.g. myrrh, metal, wood. As for the Kingdom of Punt, it was probably situated in the area of today’s Somalia; others point towards neighbouring eastern Ethiopia and Eritrea. This lucrative trade network continued all the way into the classical era connecting local merchants with Phoenicia, Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece, Parthian Persia, Sheba, Nabataea, and the Roman Empire.

Penteconter

● In Hannu’s time, or perhaps a little later, the Cretans started their voyages during the Minoan thalassocracy in the Mediterranean, and maybe beyond. There followed the Argonautic expedition, and the Odyssey (meaning Odysseus’ wanderings) in the late Bronze Age.⁽⁶⁾ Everything we know about those voyages, and many others in that period, comes not from the navigators’ logbooks but from other sources. This does not mean they did not keep notes: long-distance voyages were inconceivable with no such peripli-logs of some sort, as we have said.

• ⁽⁶⁾ The Trojan War, according to Eratosthenes, took place in 1194-1184 BCE. So, Odysseus returned to Ithaca in 1174. But some researchers, using NASA data, compared the solar eclipses recorded in the Odyssey and specified he got back on his island on October 25, 1207 BCE. Hence the war took place in the decade 1227-1217. (On the Argonauts, see Chronicle 15, footnote 7, and Chronicle 22, Massaliote Periplus revival).

● According to Herodotus, the Phoenicians carried out a great feat: the first periplus of “Libya” (i.e. Africa), on behalf of the Egyptians, in the years of Necho II (610–595 BCE). It started from the Red Sea and lasted almost three years. A Persian awaiting execution attempted to repeat the feat, following the reverse course, in an effort to save his life, but eventually abandoned – though death was waiting for him… Even now, a voyage from the Red Sea to the Nile around Africa is not an easy thing. Epic voyages of such calibre have nothing to envy from today’s manned flights in space! Like the astronauts, in case of a long stay “out there”, the Phoenicians, too, were obliged to sow and harvest every year, since it was impossible to carry supplies for an indefinite period of time.

Herodotus and Thucydides

Herodotus’ Histories, Melpomene: “Libya is washed on all sides by the sea except where it joins Asia, as was first demonstrated, so far as our knowledge goes, by the Egyptian king Necho, who, after calling off the construction of the canal between the Nile and the Arabian Gulf, sent out a fleet manned by a Phoenician crew with orders to sail west about and return to the Mediterranean and Egypt by way of the Pillars of Heracles. The Phoenicians sailed from the Erythraean Sea into the southern ocean, and every autumn put in at some convenient spot on the Libyan coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next year’s harvest. Then, having got in their grain, they put to sea again, and after two full years rounded the Pillars of Heracles in the course of the third, and returned to Egypt”…

The Phoenicians’ voyage to the unknown (on a “boat” called… hope) was additionally unknown how long it will last, as we have said. Consequently, the crew had to create temporary settlements, cultivate the land and maintain themselves. Herodotus’ brief reference to this incredible venture ends with a truly fantastic assertion:

“These men made a statement which I do not myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their right – to northward of them. This is how Libya was first discovered by sea.”

As they sailed round the southern tip of Africa, the sailors told him, they had the sun on their right – something that he wrote down, although he was doubtful, as it went beyond the knowledge of his time. This is exactly what makes his story reliable. For sure, the Greeks could understand the movement of the sun, but found it incredible that Africa reached so far south; they thought it was a lot smaller with the southern part connected to Asia. Thus we believe Herodotus, because he did not believe an account handed down to him by oral tradition, which is why he recorded it: this is where he differed from Thucydides; the latter would not bother to mention it – so we would never get to know the story… And it was not only Thucydides: Polybius, Strabo and Ptolemy had also many doubts, unlike Pliny. The Egyptologist A. B. Lloyd observes: “It is extremely unlikely that an Egyptian king would, or could, have acted as Necho is depicted as doing.” This rumour, he adds, might have been triggered by the failure of Sataspes (the death-row Persian) to circumnavigate Africa under Xerxes I.

The Canal of the Pharaohs

So, what could the pharaoh’s motives be? When Necho took over, the situation was anything but rosy in Egypt’s northeastern border. The Babylonians had captured the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, and then defeated the Egyptians in Carchemish to punish them for their support to the Assyrians. According to the Nebuchadnezzar Chronicle, Necho was campaigning in Syria (609–605 BCE), when the Babylonian king defeated him. The pharaoh perhaps considered the possibility to attack southern Babylonia by sea, and ordered a canal to be constructed between the Nile and the Red Sea. Then he realized he was giving free access to his enemies, as well. Consequently, the canal remained uncompleted until the Persians took over Egypt, in late 6th century, and Darius commissioned its completion. But it was Necho who started the construction (or restoration) of a canal some 85 kilometers long, foreshadowing the Suez Canal.

The periplus of Africa was related to Necho’s defense plans. He asked for Phoenician assistance because they were excellent sailors and had several colonies in the West, such as Gadir (Cádiz), next to the Pillars of Heracles. The Phoenicians must have also been happy to help, as they shared the Babylonian enemy. So, technically, a voyage around Africa would have been possible. The currents and winds favour a clockwise, East-West, periplus, according to plan, as long as it is a paraplus, sailing by the coast, keeping it in sight. The periplus’ purpose was to determine the exact size of Africa. If it was as small as they thought, the canal might not be such a great idea, taking into consideration the economic cost. Other Egyptologists dispute that a pharaoh would authorize such an expedition – except for the reason of trade, opening new maritime routes. Indeed, such voyages were made for economic gain. Despite Hannu’s accomplishments, the Egyptians lagged behind in the control of the seas; and they were not after sea adventures of any kind. There was already a status quo in place in the Mediterranean, with the Greeks exerting control over the northern shores, and the Phoenicians over the southern coast. The only region where Egypt, with its inferior fleet, might acquire influence and wealth was eastern Africa, where they had already established trade ties – that could thus be further expanded.

Re-enactment of the first periplus of Africa

According to the Livius site: “The Phoenicians must have started their expedition in July, and must have reached the Horn of Africa after an uneventful trip, relying on the northern wind. The Red Sea (which Herodotus calls ‘Arabian Gulf’) was well known to their Egyptian pilots, because the Egyptians traded incense with the Arabs of modern Yemen… After they had passed Africa’s most eastern shores, the northeast monsoon – which started in October – sped up their journey, and in March they must have reached the Equator. The Agulhas Current must have brought them through the Mozambique Channel and along the coast of modern South Africa. Sailing on their westerly course, they must have observed that they had the sun on their right… When they reached Cape Agulhas, they left the current that had helped them to the south. At the same time, they encountered the contrary South East trade winds. And they must have been surprised to discover that here, on the southern hemisphere, the winter was already approaching. However, they must happily have noticed that they had started to go north. The plain behind Saint Helena Bay, 150 kilometers north of modern Cape Τown, offered a fine opportunity to land. They must have sowed their wheat in June, started to repair their ships, and harvested in November.

“The Benguela Current and the now favorable South East trade winds brought the Phoenician sailors back to the hot equatorial regions; they will have experienced its effects in a most unpleasant way, when they sailed along the Namibian coast, which is a waterless desert. It took several weeks to reach a more fertile coast. In March, a new and equally unpleasant surprise awaited them: they had been traveling on a northerly course, but now, the coast curved to the west again. They may have benefited from the westward Guinea Current, but not for long, because it changes its direction during the spring. For weeks, they were struggling against the wind and the current, only to reach – in July – the African west coast, where they encountered the contrary Canary Current and the North Eastern trade winds. But they must have been relieved to find themselves rowing in a northerly direction again. Somehow they managed to beat against the wind and the current, and in November they must have landed somewhere on the coast of modern Mauritania… The voyagers sowed their wheat, repaired their ships, and waited for the next harvest…

“In May, they brought their ships to the sea, and started to beat their way up to along the Moroccan coast, where they discovered that they had returned to the world they knew: the town on Mogador island was occupied by Phoenicians. Having told the incredible story of their trip to the southern hemisphere, and no doubt with new equipment, they continued their voyage; soon they reached Phoenician towns like Lixus, modern Cádiz and Málaga, and Carthage. They must have reached Egypt at the end of the summer. Their expedition had lasted three full years. This story, told by Herodotus, was generally questioned after the famous geographer Ptolemy had said that it was impossible to circumnavigate Africa”… Thus this “top secret” epic periplus left no trace in the geographical knowledge of the time.

Peripli of the Classical and Hellenistic eras

Trireme

SEVERAL PERIPLI have survived, in whole or in fragments, and in quotations cited by other writers. The impression one gets, even with a first look at the list below, is that for a long time, from the 6th to the 4th centuries BCE, it was a Graeco-Phoenician “bras de fer” between Massalia and Carthage aimed at dominating the sea routes leading to regions rich mainly in gold, silver, tin and amber:

● The Massaliote Periplus (6th century BCE), preserved in Avienus’ Ora Maritima (Sea Coast, 4th century CE), followed Tartessian trade routes along the Atlantic shores of Europe, and recorded a voyage from Marseille to the British Isles, circumnavigating Iberia. It described the coasts of Spain and Portugal, and made a brief mention of a visit to the “sacred isle” Ierne (Ireland), located across from Albion (Britain). It is the earliest work about the trade links between northern and southern Europe; the fact that such a manual existed indicates the importance of these trade links. Especially the trade in tin to be used for making bronze is attested by archaeological evidence from even earlier periods. The riches to be won attracted numerous adventurers to the North Atlantic coast.

● The Periplus of Hanno the Navigator (6th or 5th century BCE) described the South Atlantic, along the African coast from Morocco down to the Gulf of Guinea – at best; in the worst case, the Punics probably did not sail beyond Morocco. If we trust their trumped-up information, Hanno was in charge of 60 ships and 30,000 colonists and soldiers! In fact, they should not exceed 5,000. This fleet was designed to explore and colonize Northwest Africa. The Punics founded or repopulated seven colonies on the Moroccan coast beyond the Pillars of Heracles (as a rule, the Phoenician settlements were not populous). Then, according to the official version, they proceeded further south, meeting several native tribes. The members of a hirsute and savage tribe were called “Gorillae”. In the 19th century, Hanno’s description was used as a name for the well-known primates.

Hanno’s periplus according to his “official” report

The primary source for this expedition is a Hellenic periplus, supposedly a translation of a tablet Hanno had reportedly hung up on his return to Carthage in the temple of Ba’al Hammon, whom the Greeks identified with Cronus. Its full title was The Periplus of Hanno, commander of the Carthaginians, round the parts of Libya [Africa] beyond the Pillars of Heracles, which he deposited in the Temple of Cronus.⁽⁷⁾ Obviously, the tablet contained falsified information, so that Carthage’s competitors, especially the Hellenes, could not profit. The sole purpose of the tablet was to gratify the pride of the Punics in their achievements. The very purpose of the voyage – the consolidation of the route to the African gold market – is not even mentioned…

• ⁽⁷⁾ This translation, into rather mediocre Greek, was not a complete rendering. The abridged text was copied repeatedly by Hellenes, as well as Byzantines. Two copies are still extant: one is the Palatinus Graecus 398 (9th century CE) in the University Library of Heidelberg. The other is the Codex Vatopedinus 655 (14th century) found in the Vatopedi monastery on Mount Athos, and divided between the British Library and the French Bibliothèque Nationale (it was probably sold: the monks in this monastery have an age-old strain of business acumen in their DNA)…

● Herodotus gives a story based perhaps upon Hanno’s original report:

“The Punics tell us that they trade with a race of men who live in a part of Libya beyond the Pillars of Heracles. On reaching this country, they unload their goods, arrange them tidily along the beach, and then, returning to their boats, raise a smoke. Seeing the smoke, the natives come down to the beach, place on the ground a certain quantity of gold in exchange for the goods, and go off again to a distance. The Punics then come ashore and take a look at the gold; and if they think it presents a fair price for their wares, they collect it and go away; if, on the other hand, it seems too little, they go back aboard and wait, and the natives come and add to the gold until they are satisfied. There is perfect honesty on both sides; the Punics never touch the gold until it equals in value what they have offered for sale, and the natives never touch the goods until the gold has been taken away.”

Herodotus, I’m afraid, lacks the business acumen that characterizes the monks at Vatopedi…

Himilco’s “report”: sea monsters!

● Along with the Massaliote Periplus, sailing to the North Atlantic, the explorations extended south also with the voyage of Euthymenes of Massalia (early 6th century or, according to other writers, second half of the 5th century BCE). Unfortunately, the original text of his Periplus in the Outer Sea was lost; only some quotations survived, such as those by Plutarch, or Seneca the Younger, who was very skeptical. During his exploration, Euthymenes arrived at a large river with hippopotami and crocodiles, whose outflow made the sea at its mouth fresh or brackish. It seems that it was the Senegal River. The Massaliotes should have known that the Punics, led by Hanno, had undertaken a great expedition in the same area and perhaps in the same period. There is no information, however, that the two fleets met. The results of Euthymenes’ venture were probably considered poor. So, the Massaliotes abandoned their effort in the South Atlantic.

● It was the Punics’ turn to expand into the North Atlantic, in the area described by the Massaliote Periplus. The expedition was headed by Himilco the Navigator (late 6th century BCE), with a periplus sailing by the coasts of Iberia and France. Following Tartessian routes, he reached Ophiussa (Portugal-Galicia) to trade for tin and other precious metals. Himilco gave a new dimension to the propaganda of Carthage: his voyage was presented as particularly painful; he painted a grim picture while referring to sea monsters and giant seaweed, so that the competitors, especially the Greeks, would not dare sail out into the Atlantic. It seems that this tactic was particularly effective: the Punic stories about sinister “signs and wonders” became the source of the myths discouraging voyages beyond the Pillars of Heracles.

● The Periplus of Scylax of Caryanda (late 6th – early 5th century BCE), on behalf of the Persians, explored the mouth of the Indus River, the Indian Ocean and Red Sea coasts as far as Suez. Scylax was born in Caria; he was a renowned Hellenized Carian explorer and writer in the years of Darius I. His expedition’s aim, circa 515, was to find the Indus River estuary. Sailing out into the Indian Ocean, he turned west until he arrived at the Red Sea, which he also explored. His voyage took 30 months. His report, perhaps entitled Periplus, and dedicated to king Darius, was lost, except for the quotations by later writers – such as Strabo in his Geography, Herodotus in his Histories, and Aristotle in his Politics, when he refers to the Indian kings. There are seven quotations in all, indicating his Periplus was not merely a log, but contained accounts of people, landscape, the natural conditions and political affairs. Hence it contained information intended for the expansion of the Persian Empire. Written in Greek, it was among the first works to be written in Hellenic prose. Moreover, it was the first account of the peoples of the Orient reaching the Mediterranean world and served as a model for later Greek writers. More lastingly, it registered the name of India and the Indians in geography.

● Periplus Outside the Pillars of Heracles, a work of the historian, chronographer, and logographer Charon of Lampsacus (1st half of the 5th century BCE), who lived before Herodotus; Periplus of the Inner Sea (the Mediterranean), a work of the astronomer, meteorologist and geographer Euctemon of Athens (mid-5th century), who was a student and partner of his compatriot, Meton; and also Ocean Periplus, of the great Abderitan “atomic” philosopher Democritus (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE): none of them has survived; especially in the case of Democritus, there are other reasons beyond fate (see Chronicle 22, intermediate reference to Abdera and Democritus).

● The epic exploration of the top Massaliote navigator, Pytheas (c. 380 – c. 310, or c. 350 – c. 285 BCE), took place around 325, and led him to Britain, Scandinavia, the Baltic Sea and, via river routes, to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, completing a periplus of Europe! His work, Τὰ περὶ τοῦ Ὠκεανοῦ (Things about [or Description of] the Ocean, or even Περίοδος γῆς (Travel around the Earth), survives only in excerpts quoted by other writers, some of whom treat him with skepticism, e.g. the constantly doubtful Strabo, and also Polybius. Pytheas said he “travelled over the whole of Britain that was accessible”, and explored the entire North. He saw the inhabitants of Cornwall to be involved in the manufacture of tin. Some of his observations may be the earliest report of Stonehenge; he also introduced the idea of ultimate Thule to the geographic imagination.⁽⁸⁾ He is the first person to describe the Midnight Sun and polar ice, and to state that the tides are caused by the moon. He measured latitude by the gnomon, and observed Germanic and possibly Finnic tribes.

• ⁽⁸⁾ Thule was believed in the past to be Iceland that was uninhabited until the second half of the 9th century CE. Yet, Pytheas had seen people on the island. By the late 19th century, Thule was identified with Norway. Others linked Thule to Greenland, where human presence dates back to 2500 BCE. Still, the likelihood of Pytheas sailing that far north is considered completely unreal.

Excerpts from his work are quoted or paraphrased by many others, such as Diodorus Siculus, Pliny, Geminus of Rhodes. Late writers gave titles to his book. Other simpler titles are Periplus, On the Ocean, or Ocean. After Britain and Norway, there followed the discovery of the Baltic and the voyage to the Don. And there, Polybius, willingly or not, created uncertainty, claiming that Pytheas turned back at the mouth of the Vistula, at the border of Scythia: “… on his return hence, he traversed the whole of the coast of Europe from Gades to the Tanais”… Was it a second leg in his exploration? And he didn’t pass by Massalia to refit and refresh the crew? Others claimed that the “Tanais” was not the Don, but the Elbe. Some writers raised questions on the first leg of the voyage, implying it had never happened! Since the Punics had blockaded the Pillars of Heracles – is the “incontestable” argument of the “armchair intellectuals” – how could Pytheas pass? Thus we need to examine the relations among Punics, Massaliotes and Romans at the time of his exploration.

Massaliotes, Punics and Romans as… “bitter friends”

Thule (or “Tile” on Olaus Magnus sea map, 1539), located NW of Scotland with monsters, was identified by some other “monsters”,
the Nazis, with Hyperborea (see Chronicle 15) as the cradle of the “Aryan race”: the Nazi party was hatched within the Thule Society.

The Punics had imposed a blockade of the Pillars of Heracles to all ships from other nations. However, by the 4th century BCE, the western Hellenes, especially the Massaliotes, were more or less on “amicable” terms with them. First of all, Massalia was militarily superior to Carthage: they had defeated the empire in the late 6th and early 5th centuries. Not wishing to test the issue any further, the Punics had made an independent treaty with the Massaliotes; and the latter had no trouble to place and maintain colonies on the Mediterranean Iberian coast. Archaeologically the sites of the western Mediterranean show no diminishment of Grecian wares at any time; on the contrary, there was an increase due to their better quality – which is a good indication of trade. Second, Massalia was an old ally of Rome. The Massaliotes had helped the Romans in their conflicts with the Etruscans and the Gauls. In the mid-4th century, Carthage and Rome came to terms over the Sicilian Wars, defining with a treaty their mutual interests. Rome could use Sicilian markets and Carthage could buy and sell in Rome. If Carthage had enslaved allies of Rome, they were to be set free. Rome was to stay out of the western Mediterranean – excepting Massalia. During the last half of the 4th century – the time of Pytheas’ voyage – relations between Rome and its allies on the one hand, and Carthage on the other, were totally amicable. The Massaliotes were free to operate as they pleased. Neither is there any evidence in any of the sources about some kind of problem emerging “in the last moment” in relation to Pytheas’ exploration. On the contrary, mentions of Gades, Tartessos, and the “sacred promontory” (Sagres), at the southern tip of Portugal – all testify to his passing through the Pillars “in broad daylight” and heading north…

Nearchus Paraplus

Nearchus Paraplus

● While Pytheas was circumnavigating Europe, Nearchus, as Alexander’s admiral, was carrying out his Paraplus, under the instructions to steer the fleet from India to the Persian Gulf, sailing by the coast, and meet the Macedonian king at Susa. Nearchus Paraplus is preserved in Arrian’s Indica.⁽⁹⁾ Nearchus was appointed as satrap of Lycia and Pamphylia in 334-333. In 328 he rejoined Alexander in Bactria, bringing with him reinforcements. Two years later, he was made admiral of the fleet that had been built at the Hydaspes (Jhelum) river, and steered it from the Indus to the Persian Gulf – a voyage that he recorded in every detail. Then he became the first Greek to visit Tylos (Bahrain), marking the area’s inclusion in the Hellenic world with the worship of Zeus (as the Arab sun goddess, Shams), and Greek being spoken as the language of upper classes. Nearchus Paraplus was intended by Alexander as a way to learn about the mouth of the Indus and the sea between India and Babylon. After many adventures, Nearchus arrived in Carmania (Kermā, in SE Iran, where one of the Alexandrias was founded), meeting with Alexander after the latter’s crossing of the Gedrosian desert. The king sent him off to complete his voyage – he went as far as the Euphrates river before turning back to rejoin Alexander at Susa, in early 324. He then took the fleet up to Babylon. Nearchus had a place in Alexander’s final plans, as he was to be the admiral of the Arabian invasion fleet – perhaps also in his other plans against Rome, Carthage and Iberia. But these plans were cut short by Alexander’s death in 323 BCE.

Pataliputra, where Megasthenes was sent: one of the largest cities in the world. Mathura: controlled by the Graeco-Indians (180-70 BCE). Sagala:
capital of Menander’s Graeco-Indian kingdom.

• ⁽⁹⁾ Arrian (late 1st – 2nd centuries CE) was one of the main historians of Alexander the Great, born in Nicomedia, the capital of Bithynia, in NW Asia Minor. His Indica tells the story of Nearchus’ voyage to the Persian Gulf after the Macedonians conquered the Indus Valley. But much of the importance of the work comes from his in depth writing about the history, geography, and also culture, of the Indian subcontinent. Arrian, who had Herodotus as a model, relates the stories of Heracles and Dionysus in India, as well.

Indica is also the title of a similar book by Megasthenes describing the history of India; this was a major source from which Arrian drew. Megasthenes (c. 350–290 BCE), also born in Anatolia in the Hellenistic period, was a Greek ethnographer, who became an ambassador of Seleucus I to Chandragupta at Pataliputra, in Bihar of NE India, some time before 298, the year this Indian chief died. Megasthenes had lived before in Arachosia, southern Afghanistan. At the beginning of his book, he referred to the old Indians who knew about the arrival of Dionysus and Heracles in India, and mentioned the devotees of Heracles (Krishna) and Dionysus (Shiva or Indra). Indica served as an important source to many later writers such as Strabo, Diodorus and Pliny; it also introduced India to the Mediterranean world. Its scope is wide-ranging, from the Himalayas in the North to Taprobana (Sri Lanka) in the South.

Hellenistic culture in the Indian subcontinent: Graeco-Indian banquet, with Hellenic clothes, amphoras, wine, music (1st–2nd centuries CE)

● Androsthenes of Thasos was another admiral of Alexander’s, and also a trierarch (commander of a trireme) of Nearchus’. The account of his voyage is a Paraplus of Indica. Alexander sent him down the Euphrates in an exploration, skirting the coast of Arabia and sailing farther than Archias of Pella. The latter was a geographer and officer who also served as trierarch under Nearchus. Archias was dispatched with a galley and reached Tylos; as he reported, the island was “about a day and a night’s sail” from the mouth of the Euphrates. Onesicritus was also an officer serving under Nearchus as a helmsman. Some quotations of his own Periplus referring to ancient India and its inhabitants have survived. Nevertheless, he was regarded as unreliable and conceited.

● The Periplus of Pseudo-Scylax (330s BCE) was written by an unknown Athenian. He entitled it as Periplus of the Sea of Universal Europe and Asia and Libya, and signed it as “Scylax” for reasons of prestige. He presented the Mediterranean and Black Seas clockwise, starting from Iberia and concluding in western Africa beyond the Pillars of Heracles.

● The Stadiasmus, i.e. Periplus of the Great Sea, is a work of an unknown geographer-helmsman (late 4th – early 3rd century BCE). Extant is only the part about distances, sailing directions, and descriptions of the Mediterranean harbours.

● The ten-volume Periplus of Timosthenes (early 3rd century BCE) was intended to describe more precisely countries already known, specifying the location of harbours and stations in the Mediterranean. Timosthenes of Rhodes was a major navigator, geographer, cartographer, and admiral of the Ptolemaic fleet. He additionally wrote On Harbours, On Islands, and Stadiasmi, drawing up several nautical maps. He was an expert on winds in antiquity, and the first Hellene geographer to use the winds for geographic orientation, rather than merely as meteorological phenomena. There are only quotations surviving in the works of other writers, who referred to him with admiration, such as Erathosthenes, or Strabo. The latter revealed another talent of this versatile man: he composed a Pythic nomos (law), a Pythian “canon”, if you like, for aulos and cithara to be played at Delphi in the Pythian Games in celebration of the victory of Apollo over Python.⁽¹⁰⁾

Apollo slaying Python, by Eugène Delacroix (1850)

Musical Nomos (Law)

• ⁽¹⁰⁾ “Nomos [law, canon] in music was the most important form of composition and interpretation in ancient Greek music. It seems that it evolved from a very old tradition, according to which the laws were sung by the people to be easily memorized and followed [unlike what happens now that the legislators do their best for the laws to be incomprehensible, although – or precisely because – ignorance of the law is not forgiven]… The composition and interpretation of nomoi were very demanding and set high professional standards in the four Hellenic games (Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean), where the most distinguished musicians (composers-performers) of their time took part. The Pythian nomos, the most important nomos for aulos, invented by Sakadas, was the first known type of program music and was meant to describe the contest between Apollo and the dragon Python, in five parts…” (Solon Michaelides, Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Music).

● Timosthenes either innovated, combining the aulos with the cithara in his Pythian nomos, or such a combination was already established in his time. These instruments were mostly played by professional musicians: aulos, a wind instrument, connected with Dionysus; cithara, a string instrument, identified with Apollo. The lyre, instead, was played only by amateurs. (On laws in verse see also Chronicle 11, footnote 1, and Chronicle 21, footnote 5 and the relevant text).

The duel between the citharoedus Apollo and the aulete Marsyas

● Note that no celebration was established, nor was any nomos composed, for another victory of Apollo in a musical contest against the satyr aulete Marsyas from Phrygia. The god, in order to win, was obliged to sing, as well, something that the Muses, who were the judges, permitted, of course. It was a “win on points”, infuriating Apollo, who over-reacted: he flayed Marsyas alive and nailed his skin to a pine tree for his “hubris” to challenge a god! That is how the Hellenic music prevailed over the Phrygian, and the Apollonian spirit subdued the Dionysian… However, in the Hellenistic years, according to Diodorus Siculus, Marsyas was admired for his intelligence (σύνεσις) and self-control (σωφροσύνη), while the Romans praised him for his free speech and boldness (παρρησία), and also “speaking truth to power”. His statue near the Roman forum was regarded as an indicium libertatis, a symbol of liberty, and associated with demonstrations of the plebs, the common people.

● Two great Greek navigators, who might have worked together in the Indian Ocean, were Eudoxus of Cyzicus (c. 150–100), and Hippalos (late 2nd – 1st centuries BCE). Eudoxus explored the Arabian Sea on behalf of the Ptolemies in Egypt. According to Poseidonius and Strabo, he was the first to sail on the monsoon wind system on the Indian Ocean in 118–116. They said that a shipwrecked sailor from India had been rescued in the Red Sea and taken to Alexandria. This Indian offered to guide Greek navigators to India. Eudoxus was appointed for the first voyage, in 118 BCE, guided by the Indian sailor. After he returned with a cargo of aromatics and precious stones, a second voyage was undertaken, in 116, sailing without a guide. Until then, Greek and Indian sailors met to trade at Arabian ports such as Aden, called by the Hellenes Εὐδαίμων (Felix: Fertile and Happy; while Yemen was named Eudaemon Arabia). Attempts to sail beyond Aden were rare and discouraged, involving a long, laborious sailing by the coast to India. On the contrary, Indian ships used the monsoon winds to sail to Arabia. If the Greeks acquired the know-how, they would have no need of the Arabian ports, trading directly with India. Having this accomplished, very soon, by mid-1st century BCE, there was a marked increase in the number of Hellenic and Roman ships sailing this way to India.

Greek ships and a sea monster near the Pillars
of Heracles, sketch by Walter Plitt Quintin

When Eudoxus was returning from his second voyage to India, the wind forced him south and down the coast of Africa for some distance, where he found the remains of a ship. Due to its appearance and the story told by the natives, he concluded that the ship was from Gades (Cádiz) in Andalusia, sailing south around Africa. Therefore, he was inspired to attempt a periplus of Africa. Organizing the expedition on his own, he set sail from Gades, but the difficulties were too great, so he was obliged to go back. He didn’t give up though. He again set out to circumnavigate Africa, but his eventual fate is unknown. Although some, such as Pliny, claimed that Eudoxus did achieve his goal, the most probable conclusion is that he perished on the journey…

● Concerning Hippalus, he is sometimes referred to as Eudoxus’ captain. The writer of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea credited him with discovering the direct route from the Red Sea to India, correcting the map of the area. Greek geographers before him thought that the Indian coast stretched from west to east. Hippalus recognized the north-to-south direction of India’s coastline. Only someone who had this insight would foresee crossing the Indian Ocean might be a faster way to South India than sailing by the coast. Since the 1st century BCE onwards, we witness the prosperity of trade between Egypt and India. Sometimes Hippalus is credited with introducing to Europe the idea of sailing to India aided by the monsoon winds.

● The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (40–70 CE),⁽¹¹⁾ written by an unknown Alexandrian, gives the shoreline itinerary of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, starting each time at the port of Berenice Troglodytica (also known as Baranis). Beyond the Red Sea, the manuscript describes the coast of India as far as the Ganges River and the east coast of Africa (called Azania).

• ⁽¹¹⁾ Although “Erythraean Sea” literally means “Red Sea”, the term for the ancient Greeks included the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, as well.

● The Periplus Ponti Euxini (130–131 CE) described the trade routes along the Euxine (Black Sea). It was written by Arrian in a letter to the emperor Hadrian, and contains an accurate topographical survey of the coastline. It is possibly connected with his instructions, as a legate of Cappadocia, for a march of the Roman army against the Alani. Its purpose was to inform the emperor of the “lay of the land” – the distances between cities and locations that would provide safe harbour, in case of a military expedition to the region.

● The Anaplous Bosporou (Voyage through the Bosporus, or De Bospori navigatione), written by the geographer Dionysius of Byzantium (2nd century CE), describes the Bosporus coastline and ancient Byzantium, before becoming Constantinople in the 4th century. The text has been described as “one of the most remarkable and detailed of ancient geographic texts.”

Periplus, by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld.

● The Periplus of the Outer Sea is an original work of the Greek geographer Marcian of Heraclea Pontica (4th century CE). He also prepared some epitomes: The Periplus Inside the Sea, an epitome of Menippus of Pergamon, and Geography, an epitome of Artemidorus Ephesius.

● Finally, a Periplus by Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld (1832-1901), a Finn arctic explorer, geologist and mineralogist, most remembered for the expedition along the northern coast of Eurasia in 1878-79. This was the first complete crossing of the Northern Sea Route, or Northeast Passage. It was a great feat as it opened the way to a periplus of Eurasia. Except his monumental Periplus (5 volumes, 1897), and a popular summary (2 volumes), he published the monograph Early History of Cartography (1889), for he was interested in the history of Arctic exploration as evidenced in old maps.

The Periplus of Eurasia through the North Sea and the Suez Canal Routes

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