Thalassographeïn: Representing Maritime Spaces in Ancient Greece

Ancient Greek literature gives us many relevant traces of the way people represented maritime spaces. Greek narratives endow these spaces with meaning and make them legible. Indeed, these testimonies are a significant contribution to our knowledge of the “odological” space at sea, a space of description including numerous cultural features rather than a space described. This space is based on experiential data: Greek sailors did not have at their disposal scientific means of calculating a fix or using dead reckoning navigation techniques. In these conditions, their representation of maritime spaces integrates both qualitative and quantitative features, that somehow renew Aristotle’s Categories of “quality” and “quantity”. These features are mainly based on chronological grounds and on an experiential vision of spatial relations, that match the organization of space with the organization of human maritime activities and modify the representation of boundaries.