Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East - Группа авторов - Страница 32

The Hellenistic soldiers and colonists who ventured into the Near East under Alexander and his Successors entered a not entirely unfamiliar region. Many Greeks had journeyed into Persian territory often in the service of the satraps and kings, such as the Greek mercenaries employed by Cyrus the Younger between 401 and 399 BCE and Ctesias of Cnidus who served as physician in the court of Artaxerxes II Mnemon until 398/7 BCE and wrote histories of Assyria and Persia.² People returning from Near Eastern travels likely transmitted a good deal of geographical information by word of mouth, and this shaped people’s awareness of Persian territory. Hecataeus of Miletus (fl. 500 BCE) traveled in Asia and Egypt and wrote Periodos Gēs (Circuit of the Earth), alternatively titled Periēgēsis (Guidebook of the Earth), in which he combined information from his travels with the ideas promulgated by the Milesian philosophers.³ This was the first geographical prose text, soon followed by Herodotus’s Histories, which contains several criticisms of earlier methods and results (cf. Hdt. 4.36–42). We know of other early writers of Persian histories (typically entitled Persika), whose works are now fragmentary: Dionysius of Miletus (FGrH 687), Hellanicus of Lesbos (FGrH 687a), and Charon of Lampsacus (FGrH 687b) all wrote in the fifth century, while Heracleides of Cyme (FGrH 689), Deinon of Colophon (FGrH 690), and Ephorus of Cyme (FGrH 70) wrote in the fourth century. Thus at the outset of the Hellenistic period, Greeks, Macedonians, and others from the West arrived with a set of preconceptions about life in the East, including notions of Eastern geography and the disposition and significance of different territories within it.

With Alexander was a group of men conventionally known as the bematists, or “pacers,” who accompanied his army engineers and surveyed the land routes traversed by his campaign (cf. Fraser 1996: 78ff). Pliny the Elder (HN 6.61–62) names Diognetos and Baiton as Alexander’s itinerum mensores and lists their land measurements for a long distance route from Media to India passing through the Caspian Gates, Hecatompylos, Alexandria in Areia, Prophthasia of the Drangoi, a city of the Arachosians, Hortospanus, Alexandria near the Hindu Kush, the Copheta river and Peucolaïtis, the Indus and Taxila, and finally the Hydaspes. He notes also that variant calculations existed for the stretch up to the Hindu Kush, presumably because more people were able to explore here than beyond it in the Indus region. Athenaeus (10.59) calls Baiton a bematist, also supplying the title of his text: Stathmoi tēs Alexandrou poreias (Stations of Alexander’s Expedition). Athenaeus (2.74, 10.59, 11.102, 12.9, and 12.39) mentions another bematist, Amyntas, whose work was titled Stathmoi or Stathmoi Persikoi. We know of another of Alexander’s pacers, Philonides, whose dedicatory inscription for his statue at Olympia lists him as “day-runner (hemerodromos) of king Alexander and bematist of Asia” (Inschriften von Olympia 276 and 277; Paus. 6.16.5). Philonides probably earned his statue for running across the Peloponnese from Sicyon to Elis, reported by Pliny (HN 2.181 and 7.84) as a distance of 1,305 stades, or approximately 149 miles (Matthew 1974: 165–166). That Philonides combined service as a courier and pacer recalls the extensive highway network used by the Persians for communicating across their empire. Aristotle (de mundo 398a) names hēmerodromoi among the servants of the king, and Herodotus (8.89) describes the impressive speed of the Persian couriers who relayed messages from station to station on horseback, a task requiring thorough knowledge of the terrain. Pliny (HN 6.63) hints that bematists continued in royal service after Alexander, reporting that Seleucus I, or rather anonymous people in his employ, completed the distances for India as far as the mouth of the Ganges. We also know of the general Patrokles, who explored the Caspian region for Seleucus I, and to whom geographies of Hycania and India are attributed (Pliny HN 6.58; FGrH 712; Müller FHG II, 442–444).