The Unity of the City-State Culture of Ancient Greece

The unity of all the Greek city-states can best be illustrated by an example. We possess a small treatise on the geography of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, written in the fourth century bc and wrongly attributed to the geographer Skylax of Karyanda, who really lived 200 years earlier, which is why it goes under the name of Pseudo-Skylax. It is organised as a periplous, i.e. a journey by sail along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and the writer enumerates, region by region, the most important settlements along the coast. In all, 733 toponyms are quoted, and most of them are classified, directly or indirectly, as poleis. Pseudo-Skylax begins his voyage at the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) and goes along the coasts of Spain, France, Italy and Illyria, as far as the river Acheron in southern Epeiros ‘where Hellas begins to be continuous’. Then the voyage goes all the way south round Greece to the river Peneios in north Thessaly ‘where continuous Hellas ends’.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Black sea · Cartography · Geographer · Geography · Human settlement · Mediterranean climate · State (computer science) · Toponymy · Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Geology · History · Oceanography