33 - Technical writing

Summary

POMPONIUS MELA

The earliest surviving Latin work on geography, Pomponius Mela's De chorographia, ‘Of description of countries’, has not won the approval of geographers, though Pliny the Elder, hardly a discriminating critic, seems to have taken it seriously. The work is no systematic and professional treatise, but an outline for general readers, and it offers little new material, being largely based on written sources, including, though not necessarily at first hand, Nepos and Varro. Mela states (1.2) that he aims to describe the world's main divisions, then its coastal areas in more detail (cf. 1.24), and to add memorable particulars of individual regions and their inhabitants. His worst fault is that he supplies no measurements. And he was sadly misguided in basing his detailed survey on a sort of circumnavigation, after the manner of the Greek writings ascribed to Scylax and Scymnus, for as a result important inland areas, such as Bactria and Dacia, are wholly omitted. Again, in his choice of ethnographical matter he is quite uncritical. Judged even on its own terms, as a piece of popularization, the De chorographia cannot be applauded: the exposition might have been clearer and the expression more relaxed.

For all his errors (e.g. 2.57), obscurities, and omissions, Mela still possesses some interest. Occasionally (e.g. 3.31 on the Baltic and 3.38 on the Caspian) traces of unusually accurate information have somehow got through to him. And, while he will readily swallow fables or travellers’ tales (e.g. 1.47 on the Blemyes and 3.81 on the Pygmies) or take over unacknowledged from Herodotus much of his account of the Scythians, he also preserves information not found elsewhere about places and beliefs (e.g. 3.19 on the Druids and 3.48 on the island of Sena).