Pomponius Mela was the earliest Roman geographer. He is famous as an author of the only ancient treatise on geography in classical Latin, De situ orbis (“A Description of the World”), also known as De chorographia (“Concerning Chorography”), which was written about 43 or 44 CE, it remained influential until the beginning of the age of exploration, 13 centuries later.
Background
Mela Pomponius was born in Algeciras, Spain around 43 AD. The little that is known of Pomponius Mela is gleaned from his only known work, De chorographia, occasionally called De situ orbis. He was a Roman from Tingentera, a place (otherwise unidentified) in southern Spain, near Gibraltar, that was inhabited by Phoenicians brought over from Africa. From an apparent reference to the triumph of Emperor Claudius (A.D. 41-54) in Britain in A.D. 43, it has been inferred that the De chorographia was written during that year. A conjectured sojourn in Rome virtually completes the biographical data on Pomponius.
Career
Pomponius was unique among ancient geographers in that, after dividing the earth into five zones, of which two only were habitable, he asserts the existence of antichthones, inhabiting the southern temperate zone inaccessible to the folk of the northern temperate regions from the unbearable heat of the intervening torrid belt. On the divisions and boundaries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, he repeats Eratosthenes; like all classical geographers from Alexander the Great (except Ptolemy) he regards the Caspian Sea as an inlet of the Northern Ocean, corresponding to the Persian and Arabian (Red Sea) gulfs on the south.
His Indian conceptions are inferior to those of some earlier Greek writers; he follows Eratosthenes in supposing that country to occupy the south-eastern angle of Asia, whence the coast trended northwards to Scythia, and then swept round westward to the Caspian Sea.
As usual, he places the Rhipaean Mountains and the Hyperboreans near the Scythian Ocean. In western Europe, his knowledge (as was natural in a Spanish subject of Imperial Rome) was somewhat in advance of the Greek geographers. He defines the western coast-line of Spain and Gaul and its indentation by the Bay of Biscay more accurately than Eratosthenes or Strabo, his ideas of the British Isles and their position are also clearer than his predecessors. He is the first to name the Orcades or Orkney Islands, which he defines and locates pretty correctly. Of northern Europe his knowledge was imperfect, but he speaks of a great bay ("Codanus sinus") to the north of Germany, among whose many islands was one, "Codanovia," of pre-eminent size; this name reappears in Pliny the Elder's work as Scatinavia. Codanovia and Scatinavia were both Latin renderings of the Proto-Germanic Skaðinawio, the Germanic name for Scandinavia.
Mela's descriptive method follows ocean coasts, in the manner of a periplus, probably because it was derived from the accounts of navigators. He begins at the Straits of Gibraltar, and describes the countries adjoining the south coast of the Mediterranean; then he moves around by Syria and Asia Minor to the Black Sea, and so returns to Spain along the north shore of the Euxine, Propontis, etc. After treating the Mediterranean islands, he next takes the ocean littoral - to west, north, east and south successively - from Spain and Gaul round to India, from India to Persia, Arabia, and Ethiopia; and so again works back to Spain around South Africa. Like most classical geographers he conceives of the continent as surrounded by sea and not extending very far south.
Views
Pomponius added uncritical and fantastic accounts of the customs, habits, and idiosyncrasies of peoples and nations, as well as spectacular phenomena drawn largely from earlier writers, including Herodotus.
In his three-book treatise, Pomponius assumed spherical earth that lay in the middle of the world and was divided into two hemispheres and five climatic zones. Three continents - Europe, Africa, and Asia - made up the habitable world, which was completely surrounded by a great ocean that intruded into the continents by pouring its waters into four seas or gulfs: the Caspian, which received its waters along a narrow strait directly from the Scythian, or northern, part of the surrounding ocean; the Arabian and Persian gulfs, which drew their waters directly from the Indian, or southern, part of the ocean: and the Mediterranean Sea (including the Black Sea), the source of which was the Atlantic, or western, part of the great ocean. Below the equator, south of the Indian Ocean in the south temperate zone, lay another world inhabited by the Antichthones; the region was inaccessible because of the heat of the torrid zone.
In describing the habitable world, Pomponius followed tradition traceable to the fourth-century. Only the coastal regions were considered, thus ignoring the interiors of countries (Germany, Spain, and Gaul) and omitting many altogether (Dacia, Media, Bactria).
He began, in the book I, with the Straits of Gibraltar, the area he knew best, and moved eastward along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, turning northward along the east coast of that sea until he reached the Tanai's, or Don, River, which separated Asia from Europe. The European coast of the Mediterranean was described next, in book II, from the Tanai's west to the Straits of Gibraltar (included in this survey were Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, southern Gaul, and southern Spain); this segment concluded with descriptions of the major and minor Mediterranean islands. The coastal survey shifted, in book III, to the outer fringes of the three continents bordering on the great ocean.
Here Pomponius began with the Atlantic coast of Spain and then moved eastward along the northern coasts of Europe (Gaul, Germany, and Sarmatia) and Asia (Scythia), turning south along the farthest coast of Asia and then westward again along the southern coastlines of India, Arabia (following the Persian and Arabian gulfs), and Africa; after turning northward, he terminated at the Straits of Gibraltar, the starting point.
As a consequence of his major concern with the ocean, Pomponius found occasion to mention the tides. He believed that they rise and fall simultaneously all over the world. As for the cause of this phenomenon:
"There is no definite decision whether this is the action of the universe through its own heaving breath, attracting and repelling the waters everywhere (on the assumption of savants that the world is a single animate being); or whether there exist some cavernous depressions for the ebb-tides to sink into, thence to well out and rise anew; or whether the moon is responsible for currents so extensive."
