Basilis (writer)

Basilis (Ancient Greek: Βάσιλις) was a writer (or possibly multiple writers) of ancient Greece. Several ancient authors describe a writer named "Basilis" who wrote on geographical subjects, and it is generally assumed these are all the same person.[1][2] There is not unanimous consensus about his date, but several scholars say he probably lived in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE.[3]

Pliny the Elder wrote that in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (that is, the 3rd century BCE), a Basilis traveled the Upper Nile river. According to Pliny, he also seems to have written on Aethiopia, as he gave an account of the size of the country.[4] The 2nd-century grammarian Athenaeus quotes the second book of a work on India (Ἰνδικά) by a "Basilis".[5] A "Basilis" is also mentioned by the 2nd-century BCE geographer Agatharchides among the writers on the east.[6]

We also possess some fragments of his, in which he describes Pygmy peoples in wildly mythological terms, as being small enough to ride on the back of a partridge.[7][8]

The 19th century Arabist and archaeologist Eduard Glaser identified Basilis as the author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, but other scholars, such as Wilfred Harvey Schoff, disagreed strongly.[9][10]

References

  1. ^ Clark, Walter Eugene (1919). "Hellenism and Indic-Philology". Classical Philology. 14 (4). University of Chicago Press: 307. Retrieved 2025-12-29.
  2. ^ Bunbury, Edward Herbert (1879). A History of Ancient Geography Among the Greeks and Romans: From the Earliest Ages Till the Fall of the Roman Empire. Vol. 2. John Murray. p. 440. Retrieved 2025-12-29.
  3. ^ Pliny the Elder (2022). Roller, Duane W. (ed.). A Guide to the Geography of Pliny the Elder. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108595926. Retrieved 2025-12-29.
  4. ^ Pliny the Elder, Natural History 6.29. s. 35
  5. ^ Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae ix. p. 390b
  6. ^ Photios I of Constantinople, Bibliotheca p. 454b. 34, ed. Bekker, who calls him "Basileus"
  7. ^ Felix Jacoby, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker 718
  8. ^ Dasen, Veronique (2013). Dwarfs in Ancient Egypt and Greece. Oxford University Press. p. 176. ISBN 9780199680863. Retrieved 2025-12-29.
  9. ^ Eduard Glaser, Skizze der Geschichte und Geographie Arabiens, II, 164
  10. ^ Schoff, Wilfred Harvey (1912). The Periplus of the Erythræan sea: travel and trade in the Indian Ocean. Longmans, Green. p. 15. Retrieved 2025-12-29.

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William (1870). "Basilis". In Smith, William (ed.). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Vol. 1. p. 466.

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