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We know from Pliny (HN 5.83, 6.40) that Domitius Corbulo’s expedition to Armenia for Nero produced some new measurements for the upper Euphrates and Caspian region. For evidence of later expeditions and geographic surveys during the resurgence of Roman campaigns against the Parthians under Trajan and Hadrian, the main source is Ptolemy’s Geographikē hyphēgēsis (or, Guide to Drawing the World, conventionally titled Geography) (Berggren and Jones 2000: 4). We have the name of one Syrian, Maes Titianus, who ventured along the Silk Road as far as the Stone Tower (Tashkurgan, Xinjiang) and supplied Ptolemy with 876 schoinoi (26,280 stades) as the land distance from the Euphrates to Stone Tower (Ptol. Geog. 1.11.3). Maes sought to trade directly with the Chinese silk merchants whose wares normally passed to the avid Roman market via Parthian traders (Ptol. Geog. 1.11.7), and he is typically dated to c. 100–110 CE, based on the date of Marinus of Tyre, who used him as a source and in turn served as main source on the Near East for Ptolemy (Cary 1956: 130–134). Cary suggested that Maes’s journey might have been earlier, in the Augustan period under the auspices of Agrippa, when the way through Parthia was clear and Roman interest in geography and the far-east trade were both high, but the evidence for this is inconclusive. A more recent study (Heil and Schulz 2015: 74) points out that Maes himself probably did not travel, but reported measurements taken by his employees. Marinus produced a world map and accompanying commentaries before 110 CE, and Ptolemy (fl. 120–150 CE), as with Strabo’s treatment of Eratosthenes, based his Geography on Marinus’s work, adding various criticisms and corrections (Ptol. Geog. 1.6ff.; cf. Berggren and Jones 2000: 23–25).

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