Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/26

 trade who personally made the voyage to India, is evident by the text itself; that he lived in Berenice rather than Alexandria is indicated by the absence of any account of the journey up the Nile and across the desert from Coptos, which Strabo and Pliny describe at length. It is possible that he made the voyage from Cape Guardafui to Zanzibar, but the text is so vague and uncertain that he seems rather to be quoting from someone else, unless indeed much of this part of the work has been lost in copying. The coast of Arabia east of the Frankincense Country, the entire Persian Gulf and the coasts of Persia and Beluchistan as far as the Indus river, seem to have been known to him only by hearsay. They were subject to Parthia, an enemy of Rome.

That he was not a highly educated man is evident from his frequent confusion of Greek and Latin words and his clumsy and sometimes ungrammatical constructions. The value of his work consists, not in its literary merits, but in its trustworthy account of the trade of the Indian Ocean and of the settlements around its shores; concerning which, until his time, we possess almost nothing of an intelligent and comprehensive nature.