Hecataeus of Miletus

Hecataeus of Miletus

(fl. late sixth century and early fifth century b.c.)

geography.

Very little is known about the life of Hecataeus (Εκαταΐος), son of Hegesander. He seems to have belonged to the ruling class of Miletus, since Herodotus quotes him as playing a leading role in the political deliberations of the Ionian states at the time of the Ionian Revolt, 499–494 b.c. (Herodotus V. 36, 125–126—Agathemerus calls him a “muchtraveled man” [άνήρ πολυπλανής], Geographiae informatio I.1).

Hecataeus is important as one of the earliest Greek prose writers (λογοποιοί) and especially as the author of the earliest geographical work (probably accompanied by a map, which may soon have disappeared; it was apparently not known to Eratosthenes—Strabo, Geography, 1.1.11.). Numerous quotations from the work have been preserved by later writers; its title is given as Periodos Gés (Περίοδος γη̂ς), simply Periodos (see Jacoby in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie, col. 2671), or Periegesis (Περιήγησις). Most of the quotations appear in the lexicon of Stephanus of Byzantium (nearly 300 of the 335 geographical fragments listed by Jacoby come from this source—see Fragmente, pp. 16–47); but since this lexicon is extant in an abridged form only and Stephanus’ concern was mainly with the different forms of proper names found in ancient authors, the extracts from Hecataeus are disappointingly short and give us little more than the names of various peoples, tribes, towns, rivers, mountains, harbors, islands, and so forth mentioned in the Periegesis.

The latter was apparently in two books—entitled “Europe” and “Asia” (including Africa)—which are commonly cited separately; thus, typical extracts are: “Massalia [Marseilles]; a Ligurian town over against Celtic territory, a colony of the Phocaeans. Hecataeus in his ‘Europe’” (fragment 55 Jacoby), “Ixibatae; a tribe near the Pontus [Black Sea] bordering on the territory of Sindica. Hecataeus in his ‘Asia’” (fragment 216 Jacoby), and “Hybele; a town near Carthage. Hecataeus in his ‘Asia’” (fragment 340 Jacoby). The entries in the original work certainly contained more information than this, as is clear from the handful of longer fragments from Strabo (for example, fragments 102c, 119) and Herodotus (for example, fragments 127, 300, 324). The latter especially seems to have been greatly influenced by Hecataeus’ work (cf. the detailed analyses made by Bunbury, Jacoby, Pearson, and Thomson), which was evidently the chief geographical work of the fifth century b.c. It is likely that when Herodotus mentions—often critically (as, for example, his scorn for the traditional circular shape of the Ionian maps in which the river Oceanus is depicted as going round the rim, IV. 36)—the beliefs of the Greeks or Ionians, he has in mind Hecataeus, who is the only authority actually cited by name and quoted verbatim by Herodotus (cf. II. 143; VI. 137). There is some evidence, however, that Hecataeus himself also criticized his predecessors, and Herodotus was no doubt influenced by this (see Jacoby, cols. 2675–2685). The Periegesis seems to have contained nothing on mathematical geography or geographical theory. Rather, it apparently described briefly the main features, region by region, of the (largely coastal) areas of the Mediterranean world as then known to the Greeks, more in the manner of the later periplus, or coastal survey, than in the connected, expository narrative form of Herodotus, Eratosthenes, and Strabo (see Jacoby, col. 2700; Thomson, p. 88).

Hecataeus also wrote a work in four books variously cited as Genealogiae, Historiae, or Heroologia, of which Jacoby prints some thirty-five fragments which indicate that it dealt with genealogical, mythographical, and ethnographical topics, with perhaps some attention to chronological questions (Pauly-Wissowa, col. 2733 ff.).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fragments of Hecataeus’ works appear in F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, pt. IA (Leiden, 1957), pp. 1–47; and “Hekataios 3,” in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopādie, VII (1912). cols. 2667–2750. He is discussed in E. H. Bunbury, History of Ancient Geography (London, 1879), I, 134–155; L. Pearson, Early Ionian Historians (Oxford, 1939), pp. 25–108; and J. O. Thomson, History of Ancient Geography (Cambridge, 1948), pp. 47 ff., 79 ff., 97–99.

D. R. Dicks