In the ninth year of the Yanxi Era, the twentieth in the reign of Han Huan Di, 27th emperor
of the Han Dynasty, a small party of foreigners was received in the imperial palace at Luoyang.
Although the gifts they brought – elephant tusks, rhinoceros horn, and turtle shell – were
not especially impressive, they claimed to have come from a great realm in the far west,
as vast and powerful as the Middle Kingdom itself, where an emperor named Marcus Aurelius
reigned.
We don’t know who these men were, or why they traveled so far.
But their presence at the court of the Chinese emperor illustrates the vast range and reach
of Roman merchants and adventurers.
The Mediterranean – or, as the Romans called it, Mare Nostrum (our sea) – was always
the heart of the classical world; Plato famously compared the Greeks, with their coastal cities,
to frogs around a pond.
By Plato’s time, Greek scholars knew the whole span of the sea, from the Pillars of
Hercules to the Nile Delta, and had divided its coasts into the three continents of Europe,
Asia, and Africa.
The campaigns of Alexander the Great made the Middle East and Central Asia familiar
to classical cartographers.
And the Romans, with their far-ranging conquests and massive trade networks, came to know much
of the Old World.
Around the middle of the second century, the Roman mathematician Claudius Ptolemy produced
a map of the known world, systematically assigning latitudes and longitudes to some 8,000 places
across the three continents.
The world plotted in Ptolemy’s coordinates is a wide one, stretching from the Canary
Islands to western China.
It is also an immediately recognizable one, though its accuracy diminishes with distance
from the Mediterranean.
As Ptolemy’s map illustrates, the Romans – for all their rhetoric about universal
empire – were aware that the world was much larger than their domains.
Like the Greeks before them, they knew that the world was round.
Thanks to Eratosthenes, who had calculated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable
accuracy, they knew their empire occupied a relatively small portion of the globe.
And despite the agonies of ancient travel, a steady trickle of scouts, merchants, and
missionaries ventured deep into the blank spaces of Ptolemy’s map.
Of course, they didn’t venture quickly.
Although a ship sailing with favorable winds might make decent time, overland travel moved
at the plodding pace of a mule.
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And now, to resume our topic: what were the most distant places explored by the Romans?
Southward, as in every direction, geography and opportunity determined the distances that
the Romans traveled.
Mediterranean merchants routinely visited Arabia Felix – modern Yemen – the land
of frankincense and myrrh.
Despite the fact that the spice-bearing regions were said to be tormented by flying snakes,
Augustus sent an army to conquer the whole southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula.
The failure of that campaign prevented Arabia Felix from becoming part of the empire, but
a legionary detachment was eventually stationed on the Farasan Islands, just off the Arabian
coast.
Roman merchants also followed the monsoon winds down the east coast of Africa.
By the second century, they had crossed the equator, reaching the vicinity of Zanzibar.
A few ventured even farther south, to places where the gargantuan Mountains of the Moon
loomed on the horizon.
These mythical peaks – possibly inspired by distant views of Kilimanjaro – were rumored
to be source of the Nile.
The Nile itself, of course, was the most convenient inland route into Africa.
Although the province of Egypt reached only to the rapids of the Second Cataract, near
the modern border between Egypt and Sudan, Roman influence extended much further – especially
under Augustus, when a Roman army marched through Nubia.
Later, when Nero was considering an invasion of Ethiopia, a group of legionaries was sent
as far as the Sudd, a vast swamp in what is now South Sudan that defied exploration until
the nineteenth century.
West of the Nile was the Sahara Desert, virtually impassable before the introduction of the
camel around the beginning of the Roman imperial era.
During the reign of Claudius, a Roman general ventured deep into the Sahara, where he reported
finding plains blanketed in dust and mountains blackened by the heat.
About a half-century later, a Roman merchant set out from Libya with a caravan, spent four
months in the desert, and emerged in a fertile land teeming with rhinoceroses – probably
the tropical savannah of what is now southern Chad.
Southerly trade winds made it easy for ancient ships to sail down the Atlantic coast of Africa.
The difficulty of returning north against those winds, however, limited the reach of
exploration.
After the Third Punic War, the historian Polybius led a Roman fleet as far as what is now southern
Morocco.
Centuries earlier, a Carthaginian navigator named Hanno had reportedly voyaged much farther,
passing a great volcano known as the Chariot of the Gods.
Although a few scholars think Hanno may have seen Mount Cameroon, it’s unlikely that
any ancient fleet could have sailed so far south and returned against the prevailing
winds.
An expedition sent by Juba – the African client king who married a daughter of Antony
and Cleopatra – discovered the Canary Islands, named for the wild dogs (canes) that roved
their shores.
Spanish navigators had already discovered the Madeira archipelago, which came to be
identified with the mythical Isles of the Blessed.
The vast expanse of the Atlantic beyond, the void from which Plato had conjured Atlantis,
was unknown.
A few Greek thinkers speculated about a continent in the uttermost west, whose rivers choked
the surrounding seas with silt.
But to the best of our knowledge, no attempt was ever made to reach it.
Although their existence had been known for centuries, the British Isles only became familiar
to Mediterranean scholars after the Roman conquest of Britain.
The process of reconnaissance continued for decades: long after the province had been
established, Demetrius of Tarsus, a Greek scholar, was sent with a detachment of troops
to reconnoiter the Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall.
And it was only during the governorship of Agricola, a generation after the initial Roman
invasion, that an imperial fleet circumnavigated Britain.
Agricola’s men were not the first Mediterranean sailors to reach the northern tip of Britain.
Centuries before, Pytheas of Massalia – a Greek astronomer apparently motivated by scientific
curiosity – had explored the British coast before continuing north to a mysterious island
called Thule.
Pytheas described Thule as a dismal place, shrouded in fog and soaked by freezing rains,
where the summer sun scarcely set.
Although Thule has been variously identified with Shetland, the Faroe Islands, and Iceland,
it’s most likely that Pytheas reached the coast of modern Norway.
After visiting Thule, Phytheas sailed east into the Baltic Sea, apparently as far as
the vicinity of modern Hamburg.
A Roman fleet replicated this feat in the reign of Augustus, and at least one Roman
merchant ventured even farther east, traveling overland to what is now the north coast of
Poland to gather amber for Nero.
Despite these forays, Roman knowledge of northeastern Europe remained vague: Scandinavia was thought
to be an island, and the regions east of the Baltic were said to be inhabited by men with
the bodies of beasts.
Much of central Asia was equally mysterious.
Although the coasts of the Black Sea were seeded with Greek colonies, from which adventurous
travelers ventured into the immensity of the Ukrainian steppe, the lands beyond were largely
cut off from the Mediterranean world by rugged terrain and the hostile power of Parthia.
There were, however, a few exceptions: an inscription discovered near the shore of the
Caspian Sea documents the presence of Roman legionaries in what is now Azerbaijan, and
Roman troops may have briefly occupied what is now northern Iran during the reign of Nero.
Roman geographers were familiar with the shape of the Caspian Sea and the courses of the
great rivers around the lost Greek kingdom of Bactria.
But the northern reaches of central Asia were populated by monsters and legends.
Even the relatively sober Pliny the Elder located Amazons and a tribe known as the lice-eaters
there.
It was sometimes said that, beyond a range of mountains shrouded in perpetual night,
the Hyperboreans dwelt in a land never troubled by a bitter breeze.
But by the Roman imperial era, it was known that an icy sea crowned the globe.
The northern reaches of Eurasia had little appeal for the Greeks and Romans.
The Far East, by contrast, with its spices and silks, held out the irresistible allure
of enormous profits.
Trade with India was especially lucrative.
In the wake of Alexander’s conquests – and, later, those of the Indo-Greek kingdoms, which
briefly occupied territory as far east as the Ganges valley – the geography of northern
India was relatively well-known.
But it was only in the first century BC, and especially after the Roman conquest of Egypt,
that Mediterranean merchants began to cross the Indian Ocean routinely.
Setting out from ports along the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea, these merchants used
the monsoon winds – which blow northeast in the winter, and southwest in summer – to
navigate to and from India, where they traded for pepper, cinnamon, and Chinese silk.
The immense value of this trade – a single ship could carry cargoes worth millions of
sestertii – attracted both captains and investors; by the reign of Augustus, 120 Roman
ships were sailing for India every year.
Although most trade was confined to ports along the west coast of the subcontinent,
a few Roman merchants may have operated as far east as what is now southern Vietnam.
Silk brought the Romans even farther from the Mediterranean.
After its initial appearance in Roman markets during the first century BC, Chinese silk
became an indispensable luxury, used in everything from legionary standards to the robes of the
emperors.
Supply, however, lagged far behind demand, since the flow of silk was controlled (and
heavily taxed) by the Parthian Empire.
In an effort to lower prices, Roman merchants developed trade routes that circumvented the
Parthians.
The most important of these, which reached China via Central Asia, began from the ports
of western India Very few Roman merchants traveled to China,
since it was much safer and swifter to deal with central Asian or Indian middlemen.
A few, however, made the long journey.
Sometime in the early imperial era, an enterprising businessman from Roman Syria crossed the Parthian
Empire and made his way over the steppe to the Chinese frontier.
The party of Romans that reached the court of the Chinese emperor during the reign of
Marcus Aurelius was almost certainly composed of merchants.
Another merchant reached China in the mid-third century, after the collapse of the Han Dynasty.
He was sent home with a party of captives and a Chinese officer as his escort.
A troupe of acrobats from Roman Syria, sent by the King of Parthia, flipped and tumbled
in the Chinese court.
Roman Syria also produced the Nestorian Christian missionaries who founded a cathedral in the
Chinese capital.
But the most poignant evidence of contact between China and Rome was discovered at the
oasis settlement of Miran.
There, on the rim of the bitter Taklamakan Desert, a Buddhist shrine was discovered,
walls aglow with classicizing frescoes.
The name of the artist, painted in one corner, was Titus.
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