Patrick Comerford
I have written extensively in the past about the Irish Philhellenes, those Irish people who devoted major parts of their lives and significant parts of careers to the cause of Greek independence, mainly in the early and mid-19th century.
I have written too about some of the figures we may see as the first Irish travellers to write about their experiences in the Greek world, going back to Symon Semeonis, a Franciscan friar with a Greek-sounding name but who seems to have been from Clonmel, Co Tipperary. He travelled through Corfu and Crete 700 years ago in in 1323-1324, and has provided the earliest-known account to reach Ireland or England of the Greek islands.
The name Symon Semeonis might be rendered in Ireland today as Simon FitzSimon or Simon FitzSimmons. He travelled through Corfu and Kephallonia before landing in western Crete in August 1323. From Chania, he travelled by boat along the north coast of the Crete, past Rethymnon and Mylopotamos, near present-day Panormos and Bali, to Candia, modern Iraklion, which he describes as a prosperous city that ‘abounds in most excellent wine, in cheese and in fruit.’
I got back late on Monday night or very early yesterday morning from Crete, where I spent most of Holy Week and Easter in Rethymnon, and visiting Iraklion, Panormos, Platanias and Tsesmes. I have been visiting Crete regularly since the 1980s, and I have wondered at times whether the first Irish tourist to visit Rethymnon was Richard Pococke (1704-1765). He visited Crete almost 400 years after Symon Semeonis. He was the Church of Ireland Bishop of Ossory (1756-1765) and briefly, before his death, was Bishop of Meath (1765), and he is best known for his travel writings and diaries.
Pococke spent much of his time in Crete in 1739 in Chania and Kissamou, but also visited Rethymnon and Iraklion. In Rethymon, he noted that the town had 500 Christian families and six or seven Jewish families. When Pococke visited Arkadi Monastery in the mountains above Rethymnon in 1739, he said: ‘It is a charming structure built around an extensive courtyard. They have a very fine refectory and in the centre of the courtyard a very pretty church with a wonderful facade in the Venetian architectural style.’
Detailed accounts of his travels have been published in three volumes edited by Dr Rachel Finnegan of Waterford Institute of Technology, who once taught me Classical Greek in Trinity College Dublin.
The travels of Symon Semeonis and Richard Pococke counter the ideas some people seem to have that Irish people were first introduced to Crete only half a century ago, through package holidays sold by Budget Travel from the early 1970s.
But during this past week in Rethymnon, I have also wondered who were the first Greeks to visit Ireland and Britain and to leave accounts of their travels?
Ptolemy’s map of Ireland is a part of his ‘first European map’ depicting the islands of Britain and Ireland in the series of maps included in his Geography, compiled in the second century CE in Roman Egypt. Although Ptolemy’s own map does not survive, it is the oldest surviving map of Ireland. and it is known from manuscript copies made during the Middle Ages and from the text of the Geography which gives coordinates and place names.
Claudius Ptolemy (ca 100 to ca 160s or 170s CE) had a Roman name, indicating his status as a free Roman citizen, and a Greek name. There are suggestions that he was born in Ptolemais Hermiou, a Greek city in the Thebaid region of Egypt (now El Mansha), and he died in Alexandria.
Given the creation process, the time period involved, and the fact that the Greeks and Romans had limited contact with Ireland, his map is considered remarkably accurate. But it is almost certain that Ptolemy almost certainly never visited Ireland, instead compiling his map from military, trader, and traveller reports, along with his own mathematical calculations.
The earliest Greek to have possibly visited Ireland and Ireland and to have bee familiar with eir coastlines appears to have been Pytheas of Massalia, a geographer from the Greek colony of Massalia, the modern-day city of Marseille in southern France. He was the first-ever Mediterranean person to reach and explore not only both Britain and Ireland but also the Arctic Circle.
The ancient Greeks were sailors and traders. A shortage of good farming land, and a rapid increase in population in the Greek city-states, led to overseas expansion, and setting up colonies and trading ports around the Mediterranean and on the Black Sea coasts between ca 800 BCE and 400 BCE. They had a deep interest in the world, and Anaximander, born ca 610 BCE, produced perhaps the first map showing the world according to the Greeks.
The story of Pytheas is still relatively unknown, but his achievements continue to inspire scientists today because of his determination to explore what was then viewed as the wild and unknown north, the home of people known only as the Hyperboreans. As far as the ancient Greeks were concerned, they could only use myth and legend to describe the harsh and inhospitable conditions of the European north.
One of these myths suggested that the northerners were a race of giants who lived in the region where Boreas, the Greek god of the north winds, lived. Boreas is still the word used in Greek to describe the cold, northerly winds that blow in Greece during the winter.
The Hyperboreans were the unknown peoples who lived in the region to the north of Thrace. However, the term soon became synonymous with those who dwelt in the northern extremities of Europe in what is today known as Britain and Ireland, Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
Pytheas wanted to explore these northern areas and decided that to sail north and explore the Britain and Ireland, the northern European shoreline, Scandinavia, and even up to the Arctic Circle.
Pytheas wrote a book about his travels, but this work has been lost. However, much is known about his adventures through later authors who quoted him by name, including Strabo, Dicaerchs, Timaeus Pliny and Diodorus of Sicily.
Pytheas is known to have travelled around the entire island of Britain in the mid-4th century BCE. However, it is still unclear how much time this took and how much of his journey was spent on the land itself as opposed to his time at sea. Nonetheless, because of his tour of discovery, Pytheas is responsible for the first known written mention of the word ‘Britain.’
In his work Periplus (Greek for circumnavigation), quoted in Strabo’sGeographica, in Pliny’s Natural History and by Diodorus of Sicily in his Bibliotheca historica, Pytheas uses the epithet Bretannike (Βρεταννική), the Greek for ‘Britannic.’ Etymologically, the term is not Greek, but a Greek transliteration of what some of the Celts who lived on the island at the time called their land: Ynys Prydein, most likely from the Welsh for ‘the island of Britain.’
Pytheas also referred to the ‘Three corners of Britain’: Kantion, Belerion (Belerium) and Orkas. Kantion is what is now Kent, in south-east England; Belerion may be Cornwall as Pytheas mentioned its triangular perimeter, according to Diodorus; Orkas was, most likely, the Orkney Islands north of Scotland.
Pytheas may not have been the first continental European to arrive on the shores of Britain and Ireland. However, he was the first Mediterranean explorer to meticulously explore and describe what he saw in Britain and the rest of the northern shores of Europe. His observations on the way of life offered invaluable information to ancient scholars, who used his work as the foundation for their own books.
Pytheas is now respected as a navigator, geographer, astronomer, the first Greek to visit and describe Britain and Ireland and the Atlantic coast of Europe, the first known scientific visitor to see and describe the Arctic, polar ice, and the Celtic and Germanic tribes, and the first person on record to describe the midnight sun.
