The Date of Iambulus: A Note

Author(s): W. W. Tarn
Source: The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 3/4 (Jul. - Oct., 1939), p. 193
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/637282 .
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THE DATE OF IAMBULUS: A NOTE
IN the
January
number of this
Journal
Professor H.
J.
Rose' has deduced a date for
lambulus in the first
century
B.C. on the
ground
that
Iambulus'
statement
EiKpa7'a-
T-ov
'
-etva
-3v a pa 7Tap'
aros ,
v KTaa T-VoYLqIp6Wov OLKovaS. must be a quotation
from
Poseidonius,
who
iriv -3 iTrn
7v
'lor?EpeV3y
KAq.La
Eaixpa-rov
etvat
tnTEAafle.3
I am
afraid that this is
merely
a
mistake; for,
long
before
Poseidonius, Eratosthenes,
whom
Polybius followed,
had made
precisely
the same statement about the
equatorial
belt.4
Iambulus
might
have been
quoting
Eratosthenes,
but there is no need to
suppose
that
he was even
doing that;
the old view that the torrid zone was uninhabitable had been
dispelled
once for all
by
the discoveries of the
Alexander-expedition
and the
early
Ptolemaic
exploration southward5 (Dalion,
for
example,
went south
beyond Meroe),
and
though
the
third-century
writers on
geography
are
mostly lost,
the
habitability
of the
equatorial
belt must have been a
commonplace long
before Eratosthenes
crystallized
it for ourselves. I need not discuss
Iambulus'
actual date
here;
much has
been written about
him,
and there is no doubt that he
belongs
to the constructive
period
of Hellenistic
thought,
which
is,
roughly speaking,
the third
century;
even
without the
part played by
his
Utopia
in
133 B.c.,
such a date as the first
century
would be
impossible.
W. W. TARN
S
'The date of
lambulus', C.Q.
xxxiii.
1939,
P. 9.
2 Diod. ii. 56. 7.
3 Cleomedes,
De
motu circ. I. 6, p. 56, 27
Ziegler
=-
Poseidonios fr.
78 Jacoby.
4
Strabo
ii. 97
El
8',
aoTep
'Eparoaeo0jv ~oalv,
7
vToTniTTrovaa
7rJ.
c2oIEplvc
oEaTtv
EvKpaTOS, KaGalTep
Kat HoWSfi'oA d/WOSEZt
K.T.A.
s
See
Tittel, 'Geminos',
in P.-W.
vii,
col.
io34;
Gisinger, 'Geographie',
in
P.-W., Supp.
Band
iv,
col.
607.
4599 N
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