What Did the Ancient Greeks and Romans Know About Britain?

The island of Britain is a cultural powerhouse, the former hub of an empire that spanned a quarter of the world's landmass, and the reason why English remains the global language of politics and commerce to this day. Yet, throughout most of antiquity, Britain was an unknown backwater, considered impossibly mysterious, or outright fictional by the sophisticated civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean until its conquest by the Romans in the 1st century CE. Before Emperor Claudius' annexation, Britain was considered a great unknown, a land of fog, demons and evil spirits, beyond the pale of human civilization. But how mysterious was Britain, really? And how much did the peoples of ancient Greece and Rome know about it? In this video, we will examine the accounts and dive into what the most sophisticated civilizations of antiquity thought about the island on the edge of the world. This video is sponsored by You! 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Archaeological studies of ingots found in Bronze Age ships off the coast of Palestine have revealed traces of tin sourced from Britain, indicating indirect trade connections dating back to the 1300s BCE. As one of the two component metals necessary in forging the alloy of bronze, tin was one of the most precious commodities in the titular Bronze Age. The British Isles were one of the earliest hubs of tin production in Europe, with British tin spreading across the Mediterranean world throughout the Bronze Age. This trade appears to be largely indirect however, as no Bronze Age tablets mention Britain in any way, leaving modern historians unsure whether anyone in the Mediterranean knew of or saw Britain firsthand. This textual silence continued well into the Iron Age, in the first millennium BCE, as Greek and Phoenician colonies sprouted across the Mediterranean. British tin continued to be traded with the rest of Europe and North Africa, but no ancient records appear to mention Britain as a place or to describe anyone from Greece, Italy or the Levant travelling there. This is because the vast majority of coastal cities in the ancient world were concentrated in the eastern Mediterranean. In contrast, Greek and Phoenician colonies in western Mediterranean were less numerous, and while their sailors were in closer proximity to Britain, they left fewer written records, of which fewer still survive. In short, Britain was probably not a part of the average person's geographical imagination. Nevertheless, it appears that some voyages from Carthage did in fact reach the island during the Iron Age, centuries before any Greek or Roman set foot upon its shores. First century CE accounts by the Roman author Pliny mention a man named Himilco, who probably lived 600 years earlier in the 5th century BCE. This Himilco was a trader, navigator and explorer who crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and explored the northern shores of Europe. He appears to have sailed north along the coast of Portugal and Galicia, and then to have followed the western coast of France up towards Brittany. He probably ended up either in southern England or Ireland, as it is mentioned that he reached the Tin Islands, or Cassiterides. Himilco wrote a travelogue known as the Periplus of the Northern Sea. Unfortunately, this text has not survived to the modern day, with only secondary mentions and citations attesting to its existence. As a seagoing civilization based in the western Mediterranean, the Carthaginians probably had direct contacts with the British Isles, at least since the 5th century BCE, and likely traded many goods with the local Britons. The first account of an ancient Greek reaching Britain comes from the voyager extraordinaire Pythias of Massalia, who was born in 350 BCE, over 400 years before the Roman conquest of the island. Massalia was a Greek colony on the southern coast of France, placing it within striking distance of Britain. Sometime around 320 BCE, Pythias embarked on a journey from Marseille, passing through the Strait of Gibraltar and sailing north along the coast. This epic journey was tremendous in scope, taking him to Brittany, Britain, and even the Baltic Sea. His book, named Periplus, provided a detailed account of this journey, but has sadly not survived in its entirety. The information we have about it is fragmentary, but nonetheless provides us with an interesting purview into ancient British life through Greek eyes. Pythias appears to have circumnavigated Britain, for he describes it semi-accurately as triangular in shape. His estimate of Britain's size varies with the interlocutor, but it ranged from 40,000 stadia. Translating this ancient Greek unit gives us a range of 7,314 to 7,770 kilometers, which is rather far off from the modern British coastline of 12,429 kilometers. The circumnavigation is also evident in the mentioning of the Orcas Islands, which likely refers to the Orkney Isles off the northern coast of Scotland. Pythias also commented on the long summer days in Britain, noting that they last 17 to 18 hours, and that the fixed stars, an ancient term for the visible planets of the solar system, were visible there for half the year. Pythias referred to the island as Prytanike, a Greek transliteration of a local Celtic tribal name taken from some locals. We're unsure which tribe Pythias interacted with to acquire this name. One possibility is that it was a nation known as the Prytani, the same tribe that Julius Caesar probably encountered when he invaded the island 300 years later. Pythias also provided names for some of the coastal settlements he encountered, one of which he named Kantion, or, as it's known today, Kent. The Iron Age British were said by Pythias to live in cottages and to practice various crafts. Pythias makes special mention of the tin industry in Iron Age Britain. The most important region for this industry appears to have been Cornwall. According to Pythias, the Cornish were gentle, hospitable, and civilised, which is not the case for many other tribes in Britain which he encountered. This fragmentary account by Pythias is our earliest extensively detailed account of Old Albion. The interlocutors who transmitted his works to us often provide differing details of his journey and hold differing opinions on the reliability of his account. However, the general details of what he discussed appear to be uniform across the sources. When the different fragments are combined into a mosaic, the writings of Pythias become an invaluable account of the geography and lives of the people of 4th century BCE Britain. Another of our sources on pre-Roman Britain is a man who often quoted Pythias but strongly disapproved of his insights. That man is Strabo, a Pontic Greek geographer who lived in the 1st century BCE, 200 years after Pythias' time, but 100 years before the Roman conquest of Britain. Strabo's Geographica is one of the biggest compendia of geographical knowledge of the ancient world, giving us fantastic access to just what the Greeks and Romans knew about the world beyond the Mediterranean. In his first book, Strabo critiqued Pythias for some of his geographical takes. He then discussed what he knew about Britain. Like Pythias, Strabo also called Britain Pritannica in his works, echoing his predecessor's claims that it was triangular. Strabo shrank Britain further than Pythias' original estimate, asserting that it was only 4,300 to 4,400 stadia in size, which converts to a tiny and inaccurate 678 to 698 square kilometres for the whole island. Regarding the surrounding islands, Strabo makes two interesting and equally inaccurate points. He first claimed that Ireland, or Irna as it was known to the Greeks, was directly to the north of Britain. In a major point of disagreement with Pythias, he also insisted that there was nothing further north of Britain, whereas Pythias mentioned a land called Thule. Strabo's insights about the landscapes of southern Britain were more accurate than his wild imaginations about the north. He specified that the island was generally flat, which is particularly true of areas like East Anglia. Thus, despite some rather curious inaccuracies in Strabo's account of British physical geography, there are details that are both accurate and informative about the status of Britain during the first century BCE. When it comes to the human geography of Britain, Strabo provides us with a wealth of information. For a start, he believed that the island was not an economically useful or productive region of the world, and that the rising Roman Republic of his time had no reason to try to conquer it. Strabo described the British tin trade much like Pythias did, while expanding his survey of the British economy by describing how dogs and cattle were also prized commodities, as was the extraction of gold and salt from Britain's ground. More morbidly, enslaved peoples were also sold by the Britons to the Romans. The people of Britain, according to Strabo, were much taller than the and tattooed themselves as decoration. Besides this, he mentions how they preferred to live in dense forests, a staple of the British countryside for millennia until the Industrial Revolution. Like Pythias, Strabo notes that they lived in simple huts rather than the complex buildings he was accustomed to on the shores of the Black Sea. Most intriguingly, he mentions that the ancient Britons used chariots in warfare, which was a rarity in the Iron Age Mediterranean. These insights into human geography have been confirmed by archaeologists to varying degrees. Thus, despite his severe inaccuracies in physical geography, Strabo is, in fact, a useful window into the human geography of Britain. That he managed to achieve this despite never having been to Britain himself, suggests that his sources and the connections of the Mediterranean world to Britain in general were vast and detailed. A few decades later, as Britain was being conquered by Rome, another man was writing about the island's natural beauty. That man was Pliny the Elder, author of the Historia Naturalis, the Father of Encyclopedias. This monumental text is divided into multiple thematic volumes that discuss flora, fauna, astronomy, geography, and even magic, so references to Britain are scattered throughout its pages. Pliny also references Pythias, providing some of the fragmentary citations we have about his travels to Britain. But he also goes into greater depth on how the natural and human worlds of Britain interacted. His name for Britain is Britannia, though he also notes that it was formerly known as Albion. The Roman naturalist notes that jolly old Britain was a rather fertile land. Notably, Pliny discusses how the native Britons used marl, a white stone rich in minerals, as a natural fertilizer. This stone is most prevalently seen in the iconic White Cliffs of Dover, where the English Channel is closest to its sister country of France. We thus learn that the British of the first century CE were both industrious farmers and knowledgeable in a form of proto-earth science. Another thing he notes is that the These discussions of the nature of Britain provide glimpses into the lives of its people, a people who lived, made jewellery, and farmed prosperously in England's green and pleasant land. Pliny also gives special note to the cherries of Britannia, mentioning that they are similar in kind to some of the cherries in the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, he makes note of shrubs These trees were said to adorn most of the island's landscapes. In terms of the animals, the naturalist of Rome also spends some ink in comparing them with other parts of the ancient world. When discussing the island's animals, Pliny states that the geese of Britain were tiny compared to their counterparts in the Mediterranean. In addition, he specifically mentions that the pearls of Britain are bad in colour and quality compared to pearls found elsewhere. Pliny provides the following commentary on these aquatic curiosities. It is established that small pearls of poor colour grow in Britain, since the deified Julius desired it to be known that the breastplate which he dedicated to Venus' genitrix in her temple was made of British pearls. This somewhat bizarre anecdote suggests that Julius Caesar did see value in British pearls, even though Pliny did not share in that sentiment. Pliny's fascination with the natural beauty of the ancient world ultimately yielded valuable information about British wildlife in the first century CE. Besides these three authors, others wrote bits and pieces about ancient Britain before the Roman conquest. The most important of these is Julius Caesar, who first invaded the island in 55 to 54 BCE, withdrawing after a short campaign that would leave the island unannexed for another century. His account of the Britons is so extensive and detailed that one overview video would not do it justice. Moreover, his campaigns were extensively commented on by his biographer Plutarch in his Life of Caesar, who also offered commentary on the island. The most important of these is that some people did not believe that Britain actually existed. This is perhaps understandable, given how distant the island was for the average ancient Mediterranean person, and the multitude of mythical regions on the edge of the world that populated folklore and mythology at the time. Plutarch also mentions ambushes conducted by British guerrillas that took place when Caesar invaded the island, which gives us a small glimpse into Iron Age Britannic warfare against an organized military force. Beyond that, there is little else about the Britons themselves in his work. Some more information comes down to us from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, who lived in Sicily in the 1st century BCE. Diodorus is one of the sources through which quotations and information about Pythias' Periplus survive. It is in fact through Diodorus that we receive Pythias' view of the people of Cornwall as really chill guys, as well as the region's other authors, Diodorus described Britain's industry, with a particular focus on tin. The Greek historian noted that merchants used the tides to set out from the island's shores and cross the strait into Gaul. There, they engaged in trade with the Celtic peoples of ancient France, bringing their mineral wealth into the Mediterranean trade network. Not much more appears in Diodorus' work about Britain, at least not in the fragments that have survived to the modern day. Regardless, even this meagre information offers tantalizing views on Britain, on the eve and at the start of the Roman conquest. Pre-Roman Britain was a mysterious land to the ancient Greeks and Republican Romans. Until the 1st century CE, many continued to believe that it was a myth. Of those who did, disagreements ensued as to just what Britain was truly like in size, and what its place in the world was. However, ancient accounts of the island do exist, and however fantastical and limited by the geographical methods of the time they were, they do show us one thing, that the ancient world was far more connected in the past than we often assume. Britain was just as part of the ancient world as Egypt was, even before the Roman conquest brought it into full contact with the Mediterranean. Its people and culture fascinated anyone from Pythias to Strabo, a testament to the island's enduring cultural appeal to the world. 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