Il periplo del Mare Eritreo di anonimo del I. sec. D. C. e altri testi sul commercio fra Roma el'Oriente attraverso I'Oceano Indiano a la Via della Seta.

• Author: Harvey, Jr., Paul B.

Il periplo del Mare Eritreo di anonimo del I. sec. D. C. e altri testi sul commercio fra Roma el'Oriente attraverso I'Oceano Indiano a la Via della Seta. By STEFANO BELFIORE. Rome: SOCIETA EGOGRAFICA ITALIANA, 2004. Pp. 278, illus. (paper).

A periplus was a sailor's descriptive geography or coastal gazetteer, but the Greek genre permitted considerable scope for incidental information, including mythological associations. Even the sober Arrian of Nicomedia, Roman military governor of Cappadocia, ca. 131 C.E., could, in his periplus addressed to his friend, the emperor Hadrian, fill out his dry report of sailing directions in the Black Sea with comments on a given port's attempt to discover somehow a connection with mythological traditions and hence profit from tourists. These periploi date from the late fourth century B.C.E. forward and are the genetic literary ancestors to the itineraria of which the Stathmoi of Isidore (see below) is an example. The first reliable scholarly edition of these texts was presented in a minor jewel of nineteenth-century classical scholarship, Karl Otfried Muller's Geographi Graeci Minores, 2 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1853-54): brief geographical and historical commentary, with a facing, serviceable (but only that) Latin translation.

The Periplus Belfiore expertly presents here is a different sort of guide: not so much for the pilot's bearings (although there is plenty of information for him) as for the entrepreneurial ship master: what to buy and where to sell and, above all, where to acquire, in India, precious goods. Ports (and their markets and products) are listed from Myos Hormos on the northwest shore of the Red Sea in Roman Egypt, down along the east coast of Africa to "Rhapta" (Zanzibar or, more likely, Dar es Salaam), then along the Arabian peninsula, coasting along the shore of the Arabian Sea, around India to the delta of the Ganges. One fruit of reading this text is a reminder that, whatever synthetic accounts ancient and modern may assert, the Arabian peninsula, the coast of the Arabian Sea, and the Indian peninsula were not controlled by centralized powers but rather (as ever?) by local strongmen who could exact taxes and control coastal trade. Our author was an Egyptian Greek (frequent references to "what we have in Egypt"; traditional Egyptian months for dating). He was apparently actively involved in trade between the Red Sea and Egypt in the era 40-70 C.E.

This Periplus was edited well by that...