Les Méditerranéens et l’Atlantique dans l’Antiquité : géographies et anthropologie

• Main Author: Jean Peyras
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université du Sud Toulon-Var 2014-01-01
• Series: Babel : Littératures Plurielles
• Subjects: frontier; Alexandrine geography; Roman geopolitics; chorography; encyclopedia; peripli
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/babel/3585

The study focuses on the period stretching from the archaic Greek age (8th c. BC) to the Antonine dynasty (2nd c.), starting mostly from the Greek and Latin sources. The first part is dedicated to Hellenic geography, especially the Alexandrine, founded on mathematics and astronomy (from Eratosthenes to Ptolemy), as well as to the Roman geography, that lies on a universal imperium and acts on a closed world, having the Atlantic as one of the frontiers (Principality of Augustus, Agrippa’s map, Tacitus), in line with the regional or encyclopedic geographies (Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Pliny the Elder). The two visions are different in concept, but not opposed in practice. The second part refers to the peripli : to the southern Atlantic (periplus of Hanno, of Pseudo-Scylax, of Polybius, of the Phoenician sailors of Pharao Necho, of Euthymenes of Massalia) ; to the west, to the heart of the Ocean, of the Carthaginian Himilco ; to the north, of Pytheas of Massalia. The imaginary of the scorching or freezing areas thought to be uninhabitable verges on the reality of the journeys to north-western Africa and to north-western Europe, but definite information does not go beyond the valley of the Sous in Morocco and beyond Scotland, frontiers of Roman power. The third part is a study of the pure imaginary : myths of The Odyssey, of Atlantis, of Herakles, The True History of Lucian. If the latter appears as a fable, presenting the possibility of a self-enclosed land, meeting point of Dionysos and Herakles, the myths underline the limited significance that the Atlantic held for the Ancients.