A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels - Volume 18: Historical Sketch of the Progress of Discovery, Navigation, and; Commerce, from the Earliest Records to the Beginning of the Nineteenth; Century, By William StevensonKerr, Robert
History
A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels - Volume 18: Historical Sketch of the Progress of Discovery, Navigation, and; Commerce, from the Earliest Records to the Beginning of the Nineteenth; Century, By William Stevenson
Kerr, Robert
Voyages and travels
One of the most important and complete surveys of the Roman empire (the
idea of which, as has been already stated, was first formed by Julius
Cæsar) was begun and finished in the reign of Antoninus, and is well known
under the appellation of his Itinerary. It has, indeed, been objected to
this date of the Itinerary, that it contains places which were not known in
the time of Antonine, and names of places which they did not bear till
after his reign; thus mention is made of the province of Arcadia in Egypt,
and of Honorius in Pontus, so styled in honor of the sons of the emperor
Theodosius. But the fact seems to be that alterations and additions were
made to the Itinerary, and that occasionally, or perhaps under each
subsequent emperor, new editions of it were published. From the maritime
part of this Itinerary of Antoninus we derive a clear idea of the timidity
or want of skill and enterprise of the Mediterranean seamen in their
commercial voyages. All the ports which it was prudent or necessary, for
the safety of the voyage, to touch at, in sailing from Achaia to Africa are
enumerated; and of these there are no fewer than twenty, some of them at
the heads of bays on the coasts of Greece, Epirus, and Italy, and within
the Straits of Sicily as far as Messina. Their course was then to be
directed along the east and south coasts of Sicily to the west point of it;
from an island off this point they took their departure for the coast of
Africa, a distance of about ninety miles.
These Itineraries undoubtedly were drawn up in as accurate a manner as
possible; but till the time of Ptolemy they were of little service to
geography or commerce, as, for a private individual to have one in his
possession was deemed a crime little short of high treason. Geography as a
science, therefore, had hitherto made little advances; indeed the discovery
and example of Hipparchus, of reducing it to astronomical basis, seems to
have been forgotten or neglected till the middle of the second century. The
first after him, who attempted to fix geography on the base of science was
Marinus, of Tyre, who lived a short time before Ptolemy; of his work we
have only extracts given by this geographer. He divided the terms latitude
and longitude, which, as we have already stated, were introduced by
Artemidorus (A.C. 104) into degrees, and these degrees into their parts,
though this improvement was not reduced generally to practice before
Ptolemy, for we are informed by him, that Marinus had the latitude of some
places and the longitude of others, but scarcely one position where he
could ascertain both.
With regard to the extent of Marinus' geographical knowledge, or the
accuracy of his details, we cannot form a fair judgment from the fragments
of his works which remain. According to Ptolemy, he had examined the
history of preceding ages, and all the information that had been collected
in his own time, comparing and rectifying them as he proceeded in his own
account.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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