Pomponius Mela

First Century c.e.

Geographer

Sources

Survey of the World. Pomponius Mela, from Tingentera in the south of Spain, near Gibraltar, probably wrote his geographical work De chorographia sometime after 43 C.E. Geographical writers in Latin were a rarity during the Roman period, although authors such as Tacitus and Pliny dabbled in the subject. As is the case both with Strabo’s geography in Greek and with later writers in Latin (such as Pliny the Elder), Mela was uninterested in the details of mathematical geography. He was a compiler of physical geography and ethnographical knowledge of his time. De chorographia is divided into three books. The first book is an overview of the earth’s northern and southern hemispheres, and in it Mela revisits Crates’ notion (advanced in the second century b.c.e.) that the earth is divided into five zones, only two of which are inhabited. (Mela still believed in the existence of Crates’ Antichthones, a mythical people living on an island in the earth’s second inhabitable sphere.) After an overview of the four seas that flow into the Ocean (the Caspian, Persian, Arabian, and Mediterranean Seas), the second book of De chorographia deals with Greece, Italy, southern Gaul, and Spain, and the third book surveys northern Europe (including Germany) and East Asia.

Sources

Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World, translated by Frank E. Romer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

Nicholas Purcell, “Pomponius Mela,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, third edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 1218.