Can you truly wrap your mind around the idea of a distant kingdom or empire about which you know almost nothing, yet that rivals yours in scale?

I've always wondered about that: what it's like to have known-to-be-real, but may-as-well-be mythical, empires sharing the planet. Would Cathay occupy a different part of the imagination than El Dorado? In my own childhood and adolescence there were still scattered pockets of "magic kingdoms", still imaginatively remote due to remaining barriers in transport, communication, and (in many cases) political restrictions - Central Asia, for example, was real, but glamorously remote. As late as the nineteenth century, the accounts of the players in the Great Game, and even those of the various European actors of the 20th - eccentric soldiers, agents without portfolio, and madmen - read as if these men had walked off the ends of the earth into worlds not accessible by ordinary means of moving from A to B.

But only just - glamorously remote, but not impossibly remote. Restricted countries, fatal khanates, but not Forbidden Kingdoms; no hope of captive basilisks, in cunningly contrived boxes scented with exotic perfumes, coming through customs in the baggage of returning travellers. And one knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was no throne out there, upon which sate Prester John.

Was China more like another planet to Romans, the caravanserai of the Silk Road more a chain of asteroids than a quotidian trade route? Places are farther or closer, or more real or more mythical, not so much in conformance with time's arrow but with the vicissitudes of empire - perhaps China was more remote to the Romans than to, say, Alexander's home-keeping subjects, and remoter still a few centuries after Rome was gone. (I would not bet on it, but then again, I would not be surprised, if in what remains of my own lifetime, the distances and the strangeness were to increase yet again.)

Posted by: Moira Breen on January 22, 2010 6:56 PM

Actually, there were Greeks and Romans who went quite a distance eastward through the Indian Ocean and who came back with descriptions of the land clear to China -- not terribly detailed or accurate descriptions, but descriptions. We generally don't know their names, but we do know they must have existed, because later Roman geographers had a reasonable description of the Indian Ocean's coastline clear past modern Singapore to southern China, and also had some idea of the terrain along the Silk Road.

As to why the Romans weren't more aggressive about exploration: that's a great question, and it's one that H.G. Wells asked in his Outline of History.

My guess at an answer is that when Rome was successful, they had little incentive to go exploring. On the one hand, their ships weren't all that great by later standards, and they weren't a naval power so much as a land power using the Mediterranean as a convenient means of transportation between parts of their empire. On the other hand, the Imperial government inhibited expansion because successful generals were a threat to the Emperor, and thus the most effective means Romans had of exploring (sending the legions into a new territory) was specifically banned. So neither naval nor land power of Rome were likely to be used to expand into new territories even when Rome was doing well. And, of course, once Rome began to fail, there was even less incentive to explore. The (very sketchy) records we have of Romans getting to China end after the golden age of the Antonines.

For a lot of fine details about this stuff, I strongly recommend The World The Romans Knew by N.H.H. Sitwell. It's out of print but easy to get as used books via Amazon's affiliates (which is how I got my copy), and it's a one-of-a-kind book.

Posted by: Erich Schwarz on January 23, 2010 8:41 PM






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