Anonymous, formerly ascribed to Arrian
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
Περίπλους τῆς Ἐρυθρᾶς Θαλάσσης · Mid-first century CE; the range argued runs from the 40s to the 70s.
A working sailing manual for the Indian Ocean run, and almost the only one to survive: every port from Egypt to the Ganges in the order a ship meets them, who controls it, what to bring and what to take away. No narrator, no wonders — just harbours, goods and prices.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Wilfred H. Schoff, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Longmans, Green, 1912). Schoff was a working secretary of the Commercial Museum in Philadelphia rather than an academic classicist, and the translation reads like it in a way that suits the text: plain, concrete, unliterary, comfortable with cargo and shipping. He renders technical trade terms confidently and sometimes more confidently than the Greek supports. Two habits to watch. He modernises place names into the identifications he argues for in his notes, so the English often names a place the Greek does not; and he supplies connective phrasing to smooth a text that is genuinely abrupt, which makes the original sound more discursive than it is.