ON THE “ARTEMIDORUS” PAPYRUS

GIAMBATTISTA D’ALESSIO

ON THE “ARTEMIDORUS” PAPYRUS

aus: Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 171 (2009) 27–43

© Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, Bonn

27

ON THE “ARTEMIDORUS” PAPYRUS*

A. The Story of the Papyrus

The so-called Artemidorus papyrus is one of the most intriguing and controversial recent acquisitions in the fi eld of Greek literature and visual culture. Its history is shrouded in more or less bona fi de obscurity, and its interpretation is a matter of heated debate. The papyrus was fi rst presented to the wider scholarly world when it was still in private possession in a preliminary article by Gallazzi/Kramer 1998 (actually published in 1999). In 2004 it was eventually purchased by an Italian bank, the Compagnia di San Paolo, for the sum of €2.750.000. In 2006 it was the object of an important exhibition in Turin, which was accompanied by a very substantial catalogue edited by Claudio Gallazzi, a leading Italian papyrologist, and Salvatore Settis, a distinguished archaeologist and historian of classical art, with important essays, and several photographs, but still no proper edition (Gallazzi/Settis 2006). It was only in 2008 that the editio princeps itself was eventually published (Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008): it is a massive folio book more than 600 pages long, accompanied by a lavish dossier of reproductions and by a CD. It costs € 480 and it has been hailed by Mary Beard in the Times Literary Supplement as “one of the most important books of the century so far”.1

The 2006 exhibition coincided with a surge of articles by the Italian scholar Luciano Canfora and other collaborators who argued that the papyrus was a 19th-century forgery, a position to which we shall come back in more detail later on: without counting the dozens of newspaper articles which have made even the front-page in the press in Italy, Canfora and his collaborators have published no less than 20 scholarly arti-cles in 2007 alone, all of them in the journal Quaderni di Storia, directed by Canfora himself. These were followed by a further fl ow in 2008 (all before the appearance of the editio princeps), and by no less than three full-scale books: a large one in Italian (Canfora 2008a), a shorter one in English (Canfora 2007d, with the “Supplement” in Canfora 2008b), a third multi-lingual one in collaboration with L. Bossina (Canfora/Bossina 2008).

The editio princeps has been followed by two further exhibitions, one in Berlin and another in Munich, and by no less than four conferences: one at Oxford in the summer of 2008, one at the Scuola Normale di Pisa in the autumn of the same year, one in London in February 20 09, and a fourth one in Rovereto in April 2009.

A fi rst instalment of the review of the editio princeps (114 pages long) was promptly published by Can-fora and his collaborators in QS 2008. A second instalment, more than 150 pages long, has been published in the next issue of the journal (QS 2009) and at least a further one has been announced. This has been followed also by an alternative edition of the text (Canfora 2009).

So, why is this papyrus so important and so controversial? Its origin is fairly obscure and in the follow-ing section I give a simplifi ed account of its history as it has been provided by its editors: discrepancies in the details provided by the various sources need not detain us here.2 It is said to have been in the possession of the antiquarian Serop Simonian, and to have been legally exported from Egypt in the early 1970s. Before this, it is said to have been in the collection of Saiyd Khâshaba Pasha, acquired in Asyût in the fi rst half of the 20th century and dispersed after the Second World War. It is not certain whether all these details are

* This paper is based on the work done in a Research Seminar at the Institute of Classical Studies in London in January 2009, subsequently developed in seminars at the Universities of Edinburgh, Trento and Pisa in March and April 2009. I am grateful to all who have contributed to the discussion at these venues, and to J. Hammerstaedt, P. J. Parsons, L. Prauscello, E. Stagni, and D. Rathbone for comments on various drafts. G. Bastianini has discussed with me the reconstruction of the papyrus roll and has allowed me to read a forthcoming paper of his on the same problem. A preliminary report of my results has been anticipated in my review of Settis 2008 in D’Alessio 2009.

1 28.11.2008, p. 7.2 For a fuller account of the history of the artefact, cf. Obbink 2009 (I had access to this and all the papers in Brodersen/

Elsner forthcoming, thanks to the courtesy of the editors, after the fi rst version of this paper had already been drafted).

28 G. B. D’Alessio

correct, but this sort of obscure background is shared with the great majority of papyri purchased on the antiquarian market. According to the editors, the fragments belong to a roll that, together with other docu-mentary texts, had been used to create a lump of recycled papyrus (they call it a Konvolut), probably with the purpose of stuffi ng some object, perhaps an animal mummy: a sort of papier mâché but not, technically speaking, a cartonnage. The Konvolut was dismounted in Stuttgart in the early 1980s producing more than 200 fragments, most of them belonging to the documentary texts, which are still unpublished, and which, according to the most recent account, date from the Flavian period. Around 50 fragments were identi-fi ed as belonging to the Artemidorus papyrus. A preliminary reconstruction of the roll was presented in Gallazzi/Kramer 1998. After the purchase further work was done in the Laboratorio di Papirologia of the State University of Milan. As far as the general structure of the roll is concerned, however, no substantial change has intervened between the 1998 article and the editio princeps. Following the controversy about its authenticity, the papyrus has been tested with the C14 method, which produced a date between 15 CE and 85 CE with a level of confi dence of 68%, and between 40 BCE and 130 CE with a 95.4% level of confi dence. The chemical composition of the ink has been analysed and has been found to be consistent with what we know of the ink produced in that time. The amount of ink necessary for a C14 testing was excessive and so the C14 method has not been taken into consideration.

B. The Structure of the Papyrus. Part 1

Let us start by having a look at the roll as it has been reconstructed by its editors. Using the circa 50 frag-ments recovered from the Konvolut, the editors and their predecessors have reconstructed portions of a roll used on both sides, around 32.5 cm high, for a total width of around 2.5 metres. In the editio princeps the editors divide it into 3 sections. On the so-called recto, i.e. the side wh ere the fi bres of the papyrus run horizontally the fi rst section, a, presents three fragmentary columns of a prose text, written in a hand comparable to other ones that can be dated to the late Ptolemaic and early Roman age. The text is preceded by the drawings of two, vertically superposed bearded heads. This section is followed, after a gap whose dimension the editors do not exactly quantify (they mention that it might have been the size of a single kollema), by section c, a large map (originally not less than 1 metre long), immediately followed by two further columns of text, written by the same hand as the previous three. These are immediately followed by a further section with no writing but with no less than 23 drawings of hands, feet and heads. Section b preserves a small section of a map, and has been placed by the editors between section a and section c. The verso of the papyrus, in all its sections, is entirely covered by more than 40 drawings of exotic and imagi-nary animals, each given its own name, in a hand looking more or less contemporary to the one of the recto.

The papyrus presents a miscellaneous content, whose variety and rarity poses intriguing challenges. The map is the most ancient one preserved from the Graeco-Roman world, and the only one, so far, to have been found on papyrus. The drawings on both sides of the rolls are without parallel for quality and quantity among the drawings preserved in the papyri. The text presents a whole range of problems of its own. The fi rst two columns (the third is too fragmentarily preserved) are a bombastic praise of geography, written in an irritatingly convoluted style. The syntactic structure is at times very diffi cult to follow, and lexicon and imagery are an extravagantly mixed lot. Columns iv and v, on the other hand, offer a summary descrip-tion of the coast of the Iberian Peninsula, moving clockwise from the southern end of the Pyrenees and getting as far as the most north-western point of modern Galicia. The fi rst 14 lines of column iv overlap to a considerable extent with a previously known text of one of the most famous Hellenistic geographers, Artemidorus of Ephesos (fl oruit around 104–101 BCE). He is an important and remarkable fi gure in the evolution of geographical writing, being the fi rst known author to have attempted a large-scale descriptive treatment of the whole oikoumene (as opposed to the geometrical treatment of Eratosthenes). He was one of the main sources of Strabo and of Pliny the Elder. In a later period his infl uential work in 11 books was epitomised by a certain Marcianus of Heracleia (late antiquity, uncertain date). Other epitomes by Mar-cianus have survived, but not the one of Artemidorus: several fragments, though, have been preserved in

On the “Artemidorus” Papyrus 29

quotations in the late antique encyclopaedia on the names of places and peoples of Stephanus of Byzantium. Stephanus’ work, in its turn, is preserved almost entirely in an epitomised version. A quotation overlap-ping with the papyrus text has actually been preserved in the work On the administration of the Empire of the 10th-century Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos, who was drawing either on a fuller version of Stephanus (who, in his turn, drew mainly, but arguably not only,3 on Marcianus) or, perhaps, on Marcianus himself. This quotation comes from the second book of Artemidorus’ Geography and is now fr. 21 in the most recent edition of Artemidorus’ fragments, which is still that of Stiehle 1856. There are a few differences between the text preserved in the papyrus and that preserved by Constantine Porphyrogenitos: in a few cases the papyrus confi rms (or, at least, is closer to) some modern conjectures; in other cases it offers a new text.4

C. Two Alternative Explanations: “The Three Lives” vs. “Constantine Simonides”

So, what is the relation between the 5 columns of our papyrus and the geographer Artemidorus? Two dra-matically divergent approaches have been advanced: one by the team of the editors, another by Canfora and his collaborators. Let us examine fi rst the editors’ reconstruction, the theory of the “Three Lives of the Artemidorus Papyrus”. According to the editors, the roll was originally a deluxe copy o f the second Book of Artemidorus’ Geography (perhaps produced at Alexandria). Section a was the beginning of the roll, where the text was originally preceded by an unwritten section, the so-called agraphon. These three col-umns were, in their opinion, the programmatic proem to the book. The proem was meant to be followed by a map of some portion of Spain: a map was drawn, but, for some unclear reason, the project was abandoned, as the map lacks any signs that may lead to the identifi cation of the territory represented, or to its own inter-pretation by any viewer, for that matter. The proem (and the map) was followed by the fi rst descriptive sec-tion of Book 2, dealing with the Iberian Peninsula as a whole. This should have been followed by another map, but at this point the whole project was aborted: this is the end of the fi rst life of the papyrus. At a later stage, the whole outer surface of the roll (the verso) was reused for an album of drawings by one or more artists who meant to use them as a repertoire for reproducing the fi gures in other media (such as mosaics). At this stage, the papyrus’ second life, the book was in an artistic atelier: it was then that somebody thought it would be a waste of papyrus not to make good use of all the blank spaces that had been left on the recto. The blank areas at the beginning and at the end of the roll were therefore fi lled with drawings based on plaster casts of archaic, classical and later statues. This was the papyrus’ third life.

This reconstruction entails several problems. From the point of view of the text, the main diffi culty lies in the relation between the “proem” and the description of Spain. A fi rst issue has to do with the structure of Artemidorus’ Geography and its compatibility with the sequence as reconstructed by the editors. The second is raised by the striking difference in style and language between the two sections. As we shall see later on these are by no means the only problems with this reconstruction.

The editors’ answers to these two main textual problems have been a): that the presence of such a pro-em at the beginning of the second book could be explained by the fact that Book 1 dealt with more general matters, such as the measurement of the known world; b) that the style of the proem is different from that of the following geographical description because its function was different; and c) that it represents a rare example of the so-called Asianic style of oratory.5

On the other hand, Luciano Canfora, with the assistance of (and in convergence with) several other scholars and collaborators has argued that the whole roll is the work of the famous 19th-century forger Con-stantine Simonides. This remarkable swindler was born, perhaps, in 1820, and acquired fame as a forger

3 Cf. Hammerstaedt forthcoming a, n. 12.4 For an up-to-date discussion on the relation between the text of the papyrus and that of Constantine Porphyrogenitos cf.

Billerbeck 2009, West 2009 and Hammerstaedt forthcoming a, who effectively challenge Canfora’s claims that the text of the papyrus refl ects Marcianus’ text and some mistaken modern conjectures.

5 For a summary of these positions, cf. Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: 113–115 and 134–139.


of ancient manuscripts, which he managed to sell to important European institutions around the middle of the century. The news of his death in a plague outbreak in Alexandria was circulated in 1867 (the Times of London 19th October), but there is evidence that he was still active at the end of the decade, and perhaps still at the beginning of the 1870s. After a period of complete lack of news of his activities for almost two dec-ades, the next tiding is provided by an obituary published, again, in the Times of London reporting, again, his death, this time in a small village in Albania, on the 18th October 1890. Canfora and his collaborators have done a remarkable job exploring the diffi culties and the intricacies of this papyrus and have pointed out many important problems and peculiarities. Their general thesis, however, hardly carries any conviction for a series of reasons. 1) The physical condition of the papyrus, its date, and the composition of its inks are perfectly compatible with those of a genuinely ancient artefact. The handwriting looks to me, and to scholars as experienced as P. J. Parsons, “entirely typical of the period”, and certainly far more competent than the specimina of Simonidean papyri that have been published so far.6 In order to achieve t hese results a forger would have needed a competence far exceeding that of Simonides, and a considerable amount of time at his disposal. 2) The text shows linguistic features and presupposes a knowledge of Realien that were not available during Simonides’ lifetime, and, in one case at least arguably not before the 1980’s.

It is my contention that both Settis and Canfora’s positions are mistaken, and that the text of this extraordinary roll is neither a copy of Book 2 of Artemidorus’ Geography nor the work of a 19th-century forger, but a miscellaneous compilation of the early Imperial period that includes an extract of Artemi-dorus’ work (perhaps adapted and abridged), followed (not preceded) by a general praise of the science of Geography. The two passages are most remarkably interspersed by sections of drawing of various nature and are preceded either by a map or by the drawing of a landscape. The coherence of the whole project is still obscure, and is perhaps destined to remain such, but the nature of its physical structure can be clarifi ed to a considerable extent.

D. Can It Be A Forgery?

In the following section I shall briefl y mention some of the features of the language and the content of the text that make its attribution to a 19th-century forger impossible, and that to later forger extremely unlikely. In the second place, I shall show how the reconstruction of the papyrus offered in the editio princeps (and not questioned by Canfora), is seriously fl awed and that the papyrus section with columns i–iii (the so-called “proem”) must be placed after the large section comprising the “map”, the description of the Iberian peninsula and the drawings of the hands, feet and heads.

In the fi rst place, let us examine some features incompatible with a 19th century forgery (the second and the third ones improving arguments already advanced by the editores principes). Let us start with the fi rst sentence of the so-called proem. It is so convoluted that it almost defi es translation. Nevertheless, I shall provide a working one: “Whoever devotes himself to geography must make a display of the whole scientifi c knowledge after having walled/moulded his own soul in advance for this occupation with a voli-tion more effi cacious for such undertaking and having made himself ready with his organs of volition of the soul according to the power of his virtue”.7 The participle propla!teÊ!anta is the reading of the editores principes. L. Bossina, one of Canfora’s collaborators, before the editio princeps was published, had read the verb pro(-)talanteÊ!anta in this passage (“having weighed in advance”), and argued that the choice of verb and image betrayed an author familiar with Christian writings and imagery.8 This reading, however, is clearly incompatible with the space of around 6 mm available for the traces between pro and la in the

6 Cf. Parsons 2009: 35 (the handwriting is described as “unexceptionable” already in The Times Literary Supplement, 22.2.2008). For the specimina, cf. Canfora 2008a: plates 14–16.

7 West 2009: 107 n. 2 supplements geograf¤[a!] and argues that §piballÒmenon here governs the infi nitive poie›!yai. In the syntactic context of the text as reconstructed in the editio princeps, however, the infi nitive must be governed by de›, unless in line 8 ye›nai is read instead of y°nta. Judging from the photograph, very little of the word can be deciphered, apart from the fi rst letter (that, at any rate, clearly rules out the supplement [poie›n] still adopted by Canfora 2009: 8).

8 Cf. Bossina in Canfora 2008a: 367–389. Cf. also Canfora 2009: 8.


papyrus, far too narrow for Bossina’s ta, which in this handwriting requires at the very least 9 mm, but more often more tha n 10 mm.9 The reading of the editio princeps therefore is the only proposed so far to be compatible with space and traces. The verb propla!teÊv is not attested elsewhere, and the simple verb pla!teÊv occurs only in Byzantine authors with the meaning of “to falsify”, obviously unsuitable in this passage. Two compound verbal forms, peripla!teÊv and !umpla!teÊv, however, are attested in Egyptian documentary papyri, where they are used to describe plots of cultivated land, mainly vineyards, protected by clay or mud walls.10 The fi rst occurrence of one of these verbs (peripla!teÊv) to be published was in a small group of late antique papyri with lease contracts from the Fayyum, from collections in Paris and Vienna, collected in an article by the Czech scholar Carl Wessely in a French Egyptological journal in 1885.11 The contracts were published without translations and indexes and it would have taken an extremely alert reader to take notice of this new meaning of a rare word with the purpose of using it in his forgery. But things would have been even more diffi cult: in fact, the exact meaning of the verb in the Fayyum papyri had escaped even their editor, Carl Wessely, who thought that the form peripepla!teum°non must have been a spelling mistake for peribebla!teum°non, “to surround with plantations/hedges”.12 It was only later, when further papyri (one of them a Hellenistic one) with this same and similar verbal forms were published, that it became clear that there was no mistake. And only much later did these words (and their correct explana-tions) fi nd their way in general lexica.13 Had the author of this sentence been Constantine Simonides, we would have to assume not only that in the late years of his life (if, indeed, he was still alive in 1885), he must have been an extremely attentive reader of the Revue égyptologique, taking notes of strange words to use in his forthcoming forgeries, but also that he must have understood, with far better judgment than Wessely himself, the real meaning of this recondite word in a clause of these late antique land-lease contracts. Or we would have to assume that he had divined an unattested word, with an unattested meaning, whose actual possibility was going to be vindicated in the decades to come.

Other examples would imply an even later date for the forgery. In columns iv and v several distances between geographical places are provided, mostly using the usual available numerals. One of the numeric symbols used in these columns, however, is fairly unusual. The alphabetic character sampi14 is frequently used by itself to indicate the number 900, but also occurs with a further alphabetic modifi er above it: with an alpha above it, it means 1,000, with a beta 2,000 and so on. This latter system is attested, very rarely, in a few Egyptian papyri (all dated to the late 4th or to the 3rd century BCE), and is slightly more frequent in Hellenistic inscriptions from Asia Minor (some of them as recent as the 1st century BCE).15 The interpreta-tion of this system was fi rst published in 1907 in an appendix on the last page of O. Rubensohn’s edition of some Elephantine papyri, an appendix due to Bruno Keil, who gave credit for it to the French epigraphist Haussoullier. In order to save his hypothesis, Canfora and his collaborators argue that Simonides would have been able to use this system, as it is attested in inscriptions that had either been published during his lifetime, or to which Simonides might have had access. In fact, in the two ones that had been published

9 Cf. D’Alessio 2009. For the shape of the sigma at the end of the line, cf. e.g. col. iv 36 (!an) and 37 (!thlvn). The actual dimensions of the gaps in the papyrus are frequently blatantly disregarded in Canfora 2009: another obvious case is the integra-tion of di]a-/noi[ai!] instead of orga-/noi[!] in col. i 10, where it is absolutely clear that the available space is wide enough for the single sigma, integrated by the editores principes, and not for the three letters supplemented by L. Bossina and accepted by Canfora (not to say anything of the mirror image of the letters clearly visible at the end of line 9 and deliberately ignored by Canfora). The new edition is unreliable as far as the papyrus is concerned, but more useful for the new collection of the frag-ments of Artemidorus’ Book 1 assembled by C. Schiano.

10 For a description of the typical vineyard, cf. Rathbone (1991) 248–60.11 For further editions of these texts, cf. SB I 4481 and 4482 and A. Jördens, ZPE 65 (1986), 119.12 Cf. Wessely 1885: 166 who translates “entourée d’une haie” and explains the form as a “faute de prononciation pour

peribebla!teum°non”.13 The earliest dictionaries I have found where these two compounds of pla!teÊv are registered are F. Preisigke, Wörter-

buch der griechischen Papyrusurkunden, II. Band, Berlin 1927, and the 9th edition of the LSJ (Oxford 1925–1940).14 This is the (modern) name currently used to describe the sign: the actual ancient name for this sign seems to have been

parakÊÛ!ma (cf. Soldati 2006).15 Cf. Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: 92.


before 1907 either the symbol had been utterly misread, as in the case of an inscription from Halicarnas-sus in the British Museum (I.Brit.Mus. IV 897), the only one published during Simonides’ lifetime, or its meaning had been seriously misunderstood, as in the case of a Priene inscription in Berlin (I. Priene 118, fi rst published in 1906) where the sampi with alpha had been interpreted by the fi rst editor as 10,000, not as 1,000. The correct solution had been put forward for the fi rst time in an oral communication given at the XI International Conference of Orientalists in Paris in 1897 by the French epigraphist B. Haussoullier, who had come to the correct interpretation of the sign thanks to his work on unpublished inscriptions from the sanctuary of Didyma. If we imagine that Simonides is the author of our text, not only we have to assume that he made the unlikely decision to use an extremely rare numerical system, but also that he had been able to understand the correct meaning of this system decades ahead of the most expert epigraphists. And he would have used it in such a way that readers would not easily have been able to work out its meaning by themselves: a very cunning forger indeed.16

In column v, as we have seen, the new text offers a summary description of the Iberian peninsula pro-viding distances in stadia between various coastal places. Most of these places are already known thanks to other geographical texts (some of which, as in the case of Strabo, were certainly based on Artemidorus himself). A few ones are unattested, poorly and not securely attested, or placed in positions not precisely corresponding with those provided by other sources (that, for that matter, often disagree among them). In col. v 32 of the papyrus a previously unknown town, called Ipsa, is placed, according to a possible recon-struction, to the West of the estuary of the river Baetis (modern Guadalquivir) and of the towns Onoba and Mainoba, and to the East of the mouth of the river Anas (modern Guadiana).17 Between 1986 and 1988 some 1st century BCE coins bearing the inscription IPSES were fi rst published: only for two lead coins (now in Lisbon) is the provenance known, as they were found in excavations in Alvor, a coastal town in the Algarve, around 110 km West of the border with Baetica.18 Canfora has argued a) that the difference in the form of the name (Ipsa vs. Ipses) is such as to exclude possible identifi cation; and b) that the real Ipses is to be located in the Algarve, i.e. in Lusitania, and not in Andalusia, i.e. Baetica.19 The fi rst point carries little weight, as non-Greek toponyms do appear in several phonetic variants in Greek sources (and we should not forget that scribal errors in such matters are far from rare, and more diffi cult to detect when a name is attested in a single manuscript). The second point is correct (as already acknowledged by the editors themselves).20 Anyway, the Ipsa of the papyrus and the numismatic Ipses are both coastal towns located in the south-western section of the Iberian Peninsula. In the papyrus, the mention of Ipsa is immediately fol-lowed by that of the river Anas, and by the description of the southern coast of Lusitania. The mention of Ipses, if the town was on the southern shore of Lusitania, would have found place within the next 3/4 lines, with only the town of Kilibe occurring between Ipsa’s location in the sequence provided by the papyrus and the actual fi nd place of the lead coins. It is perhaps even conceivable that some confusion in the text may have occurred here, perhaps caused by the fact that the section on Ipsa starts exactly with the same words

16 G. Carlucci in QS 2009: 299–312 goes even farther, resorting to a series of fanciful ad hoc hypotheses: 1) that Simo-nides may have had access to some of the unpublished inscriptions in situ, 2) that he may have been able to copy them and to understand the new numerical system well ahead of all other epigraphists who were to deal with the inscriptions in the follow-ing years, and 3) that he chose to use a system incomprehensible to anyone else at that date. This series of most implausible assumptions, not based on a single shred of evidence, and formulated only for the sake of salvaging Canfora’s inventive hypoth-esis, amounts to an entirely fi ctional chapter in Simonides’ intellectual biography and is a good example of how uneconomical such explanation turns to be when properly scrutinised. For a more detailed treatment of the issue, cf. Hammerstaedt forthcom-ing b (I have had access to this paper, thanks to the courtesy of the author, after the preceding lines had already been written).

17 The reading of the papyrus is uncertain here, but the supplement seems unavoidable: cf. Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: 254 and 256.

18 Cf. Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: 253, with previous bibliography.19 Cf. Canfora 20008a: 314–316.20 Though perhaps less certain than it would seem. According to Faria 1995: 147 “no more than two bronze coins and

around half a dozen lead ones” from Ipses are known. Lead coins did not have a wide circulation far away from the issuing centre: three lead coins (according to Faria 1995; two according to Faria 1987: 104 and 1997–1988) have been found in exca-vations near Alvor but no information seems to be available on the provenance of the other ones and of the two bronze coins.


(metå d¢ taÊthn §p¤) as the next section, which introduces the coast West of the Anas river (Algarve). The fact that the end of the next sentence, at the end of line 33, presents an unsolved textual problem does not help to settle the matter.21

Anyway, even if we accept, for the sake of the argument, that our author was indeed Simonides and that he had in fact placed Ipsa on the wrong side of the Anas river compared to Ipses, how likely it is that he would have invented an entirely new coastal town in the region, at least 96 years before evidence of the existence of a town with a very similar name in the same area came to the light? Canfora 2008: 315 f. argues that Simonides based his Ipsa on another town with a similar name, Ipsca, mentioned in an inscrip-tion known since the 18th century. This would make an equally impossible alternative. Ipsca, identifi ed with Castro del Río, not far away from Cordoba, is not only in an entirely different zone of Baetica (far to the East of the region described here in the papyrus), but is more than 100 km inland. The text of the papyrus is meant to provide a parãplou! (col. v 15–16), that is a description of the region from the sea, and all the places mentioned should be either on the sea, or on estuaries of rivers not far from the coast itself. The loca-tion of Ipsca far away from the coast, or from any estuary, on the other hand, was known, exactly thanks to the aforementioned inscription, and would of course have been clear to Simonides as well. Why would the forger have deliberately inserted in the description of coastal Spain the name of a town whose inland loca-tion he was bound to know? Canfora argues that this is the case also with another town mentioned in the papyrus immediately before Ipsa, Mainoba, whose location in coastal Baetica the author had mistakenly inferred by its mention in Strabo 3.2.5. According to Canfora 2008a: 288, Strabo (“con perdonabile impro-prietà”) in that passage referred in fact to another Mainoba, near Malaga. The situation there, however, is not comparable. Even if Canfora’s assumption were right, the author of the papyrus would have picked the name of a town that he, mistakenly, believed to belong to that part of coastal Baetica.22 Deliberately mis-placing Ipsca from near Cordoba to the westernmost part of coastal Baetica would be an entirely different matter. But Canfora’s assumption about the identifi cation of Mainoba in the Strabo passage is certainly wrong. Strabo quotes Mainoba among the towns located on the estuaries of the rivers (énaxÊ!ei!), to which the geographer devotes a detailed excursus, and whose main feature is a continuous interaction with the tides of the Ocean. This is obviously not the case with the other Mainoba, located near Malaga in the Medi-terranean area, far away from the Ocean, and from the tide patterns of the estuaries of the rivers that fl ow into it. Both Strabo and our papyrus clearly refer to a town on the estuary of the Mainoba river (mentioned in Plin. nat. hist. 3.11–12), in Western Baetica.

On the whole, there seems to be a very strong probability that with ÖIca pÒli! the author of our text was referring to the same town that issued the IPSES coins. It must remain uncertain at this stage whether he had mistakenly placed the town on the wrong side of the border between Baetica and Lusitania (which coincided with the Anas river), or whether Ipsa/Ipses was indeed a town in western Baetica, and the two or three lead coins found in the Algarve had been brought there by somebody who had travelled there from Ipsa/Ipses. In either case, the author must have been working in antiquity, or after the mid 1980s. Accord-ing to the reports of the fi rst editors, however, by that date the papyrus had already been partly restored in Stuttgart and inspected by two papyrologists, Günter Grimm and the late J. C. Shelton, at the University of Trier.23 If this information is correct the papyrus can hardly be a forgery.

In conclusion, the identifi cation of this papyrus as a forgery by Constantine Simonides involves a great deal of altogether fantastic ad hoc hypothetical constructions that, far from providing a more economical explanation of the evidence, force their advocates into more and more implausible fi ctions. It can certainly be ruled out as extremely implausible. Any attribution to a later forger would imply an author aware of the existence of the Ipses coins (fi rst published, as we have seen, after the mid 1980’s). A further relevant ele-

21 The precariously reconstructed sequence t∞! éxye¤!h! eÈye¤a! is not satisfactory from a syntactical point of view: the editors translate it as if it were a genitive absolute, but this is incompatible with the position of the article (cf. the right remarks in Canfora 2008a: 312).

22 We have to keep in mind, anyway, that the other Mainoba too is a coastal town.23 Cf. Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: 54 and 59.


ment, to be examined in detail in section F below, pp. 37–41, is the presence of offset images of the recto on the verso (and vice versa). If the papyrus is a forgery, its author would have replicated a feature that had never been noticed in published papyri until well into the 1990’s. This, again, is hardly compatible with the circumstance that the papyrus had been studied at the University of Trier already in the early 1980’s. Its hypothetical forger(s), moreover, should have been endowed with such a range of scholarly, scientifi c com-petences and practical skills as to make this hypothesis far less economical than the most obvious dating of the writing of the text to the same period of the papyrus itself, i.e., roughly, between the late 1st century BCE and the late 1st century CE.

E. Why It Cannot Be Artemidorus Book 2

This brings us to the examination of the position of the fi rst editors, i.e. that the papyrus represents an aborted attempt at an illustrated edition of Book 2 of Artemidorus’ Geography. As I am going to demon-strate, this hypothesis too is practically impossible. In the fi rst place: language and style of the fi rst two columns are utterly different from those of columns iv and v, as well as from those of the more substantial quotations from Artemidorus known from ancient sources. It has been argued that the difference in style may have been due to a difference in function, and that a proem might have called for a more ornate and pompous communicative strategy. In columns i and ii, however, we are clearly dealing with somebody who is not in complete control of correct Greek, while at the same time attempting to elaborate a very preten-tious and bombastic argument in praise of geography. There are a few cases of syntactic irregularities, such as anacoloutha, irregular word-order etc; the lexicon is at the same time extremely unusual and nebulous; in spite of the long-windedness of the sentences, the author manages to make remarkably few sensible points.

A further serious problem is that the text of columns i and ii reads as a general introduction to a work on Geography, and not as the proem to a book following the fi rst one. It is true that it is not unusual for tech-nical treatises to have more than one, sometimes even several proems at the beginning of various books. In this case, however, our text, an introduction to Geography, would very awkwardly follow a whole book already devoted to geography. The situation is made even more diffi cult by the fact that, as far as we can ascertain, the First Book of Artemidorus’ Geography was not entirely devoted (as in the case of Strabo’s Books 1 and 2) to general preliminary problems, as it is assumed in the editio princeps.24

The fragments that are explicitly attributed to Book 1 are seven.25 Five fragments mention places in Gallia Narbonensis (one, 6 Stiehle, perhaps, in Gallia Lugdunensis), and 4 of them are related to Massalia: Steph. Byz. s. v. TaurÒei! (3 Stiehle), s. v. Kabelli≈n (4 Stiehle), s. v. ShkoanÒ! (6 Stiehle) and a scholion on A. Rh. 4.553, in P. Oxy. 34.2694 (obviously not in Stiehle: cf. now 9A Schiano) mentioning the islands Stoixãde! (for whose connection to Massalia cf. e.g. Strabo 4.1.8). To these must be added also St. Byz. s. v. Dek¤hton (41 Stiehle) a Ligurian settlement in the region of Antibes: this is the only fragment in this group where no connection with Massalia is evident from the text of Stephanus or from other sources, but it clearly belongs to the same geographic area.26 A sixth fragment mentions a place in the south coast of Spain settled by colonists from Massalia: St. Byz. s. v. ÉAlvn¤! (5 Stiehle). The last fragment attributed to Book 1 refers to an otherwise unknown place in Illyria (2 Stiehle), Steph. Byz. s.v. BoËnno! and its function within the book remains unexplained.27

24 Cf. Settis 2008: 60 and Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: 108, with previous bibliography (on which cf. also the fuller account provided by C. Schiano in Canfora 2008a: 116–120).

25 The last collection of Artemidorus’ fragments is still that of Stiehle 1856. A new collection of the fragments attribut-able to Book 1 is now provided by C. Schiano ap. Canfora 2009: 35–48. It includes not only the ones explicitly quoted as from this book but also those attributed to this book on conjectural grounds.

26 Stiehle corrects the book number from 1 into 4, but Schiano in Canfora 2007a: 115 is certainly right in defending the transmitted text.

27 Pliny, n. h. 3. (25.21=) 139, quoted by Stiehle 1856: 199, seems to refer rather to the Boulinoi/Bulini, inhabitants of another Illyrian town also mentioned by Artemidorus and Stephanus, as well as by other sources. Since the town is not other-wise attested in Illyria, one could toy with the idea that ÉIllur¤a! may be a very easy mistake for Ligur¤a! (cf. e.g. the corrup-


Stiehle’s hypothesis that in Book 1 Artemidorus dealt in general with the dimensions of the oikoumene is not supported by solid evidence.28 That he must have given these measurements somewhere is clear from Pliny, nat. hist. 2.242–246, where, however, no Book number is given. I have toyed with the idea that this might gain further corroboration from the mention of KrÊa as from Book 1 of the Epitome of Marcianus in St. Byz. (fragment 16 of Marcianus’ Epitome in Hoffman 1838, not numbered in Stiehle’s edition, and omitted in Schiano’s recent collection of fragments from Book 1). This refers to a small town on the Lycian coast, North-East of Rhodes. Its location is fairly close to the trajectory of the itinerary used in Artemi-dorus’ measurements of the oikoumene when travelling by sea provided by Plin. nat. hist. 2.108 (“Patara Lyciae, Rhodum”) and its presence in Book 1 may provide evidence for the inclusion of the general meas-urements of the inhabited world in that book.29 Unfortunately, however, Krya lies more than 30 km to the North of the line connecting Patara to the Northern extremity of Rhodes, and its mention in Book 1 of the Epitome remains at this stage an unsolved problem, perhaps due to a minor textual corruption.30

Anyway, even if we assume that the work did indeed start with the measurements of the inhabited world, judging from the preserved fragments these measurements can hardly have occupied the whole of the book. It is clearly no coincidence that fi ve fragments are pertinent to the region between the Alps and the Rhone, while a sixth one deals with a Massaliote settlement in Spain. These territories are contiguous to the ones described in Book 2 and to argue that Artemidorus did not mention them within the general frame of his descriptive geography would be an unwarranted and uneconomic petitio principii. It is equally clear, however, that the position of Schiano and Canfora, according to whom Artemidorus had taken the Rhone as the starting point of Iberia, and that Book 1 dealt with the fi rst part of this region, is equally impossible, as fi ve out of the seven fragments deal with places located to the East of the Rhone.31

On the basis of the available evidence we should assume then that Artemidorus started his description of the world from the territory of Massalia (conceivably from the western section of the Alps). This was an unusual choice, compared to that of the Iberian Peninsula, the westernmost part of the oikoumene, the usual starting point for geographers from Scylax to Dionysius of Alexandria, through Strabo and Pliny. This may offer an important key to the more general perspective of Artemidorus’ description of the West. Artemidorus belonged to the elite of his native town, Ephesos, in Asia Minor, and had strong links with its most important and famous sanctuary, that of Artemis Ephesia.32 He was sent on embassy to Rome where he successfully claimed for the goddess the revenues from two lakes that had been forcibly appropriated by Roman tax-gatherers. “In return for this the city erected in the temple a gilt image of him” (Strabo 14.1.26).33 It is thanks to Strabo, who used Artemidorus extensively, that we happen to know how the cult of Artemis Ephesia seems to have played an exceptionally important role in the Hellenisation of the West. The Phocaean settlers of Massalia brought with them a priestess and some sacred objects from the Ephe-sian sanctuary, and this cult was replicated in all the colonies of Massalia (4.1.4). Strabo himself mentions several cases of cults of Artemis Ephesia in Gallia and Iberia. According to the geographer the inhabitants

tion of LigÊrvn into ÉIlluri«n in Stephanus’ manuscript R in the entry on GenÒa, also from Artemidorus). Stephanus however never mentions Ligur¤a as a region, but only refers to the ethnos of the L¤gure!, and this would entail a less likely kind of corruption (from LigÊrvn into ÉIlluri«n and then into ÉIllur¤a!). An alternative would be correcting the numeral: the only other reference to Illyria attributed to a specifi c book is Steph. Byz. s. v. N°!to!, from Book 2. This attribution too, however, does not square with the rest of the evidence and with common sense, which would suggest that Illyria was treated either in Book 5, before Greece, or in Book 4, after Italy (and in this case the obvious option would be correcting the numeral A into a D).

28 Cf. already Hoffmann 1838: 273. 29 Cf. also the measurements (not explicitly attributed to Artemidorus) in Agathemerus 16, in Hoffmann 1838 and

Schiano ap. Canfora 2009: 39. 30 In fact Hoffmann 1838: 272 n. * corrects the book number into a k, as the fragments of Book 10 (not 9 as erroneously

stated by Hoffmann, obviously by misprint) deal with Lycia and other neighbouring regions. 31 Canfora 2008a: 122–124, 230–233. More recently Canfora and Schiano have modifi ed their position: according to

Canfora 2009: 8, in fact, Book 1 dealt with Gallia, not with Spain. 32 On the biography of Artemidorus, cf. Canfora 2008a: 69–75, Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: 98–107, C. Schiano, Postille

biografi che su Artemidoro di Efeso, in QS 2009: 371–384. 33 A gilt bronze statue, not a “golden” statue: cf. Ampolo 2008.


of Massalia settled several cities in the region of the Iberians and “transmitted to the Iberians the ancestral rites of Artemis Ephesia, so that they performed sacrifi ces in the Greek way” (4.1.5). As already noticed, this systematic interest in cultic affi liations is very unusual in Strabo.34 On the other hand, many of the preserved fragments testify to Artemidorus’ interest in cultic matters. It is very reasonable to suppose that the Ephesian Artemidorus started his description of the world showing the exceptionally important role played by Artemis Ephesia in the Hellenisation of the Far West.35 It is also possible that Artemidorus was the source for another statement in Strabo, who says that even the cultic statue of Diana on the Aventine in Rome had been modelled upon the Artemis Ephesia of Massalia (4.1.5).36 Ephesus itself, our man’s home town, opens a window into these territories, and Greek culture is, once again, represented as the key to the mapping and the understanding of other Western cultures, be they those of the Iberians or that of Rome’s imperial power. It is all the more unlikely, therefore, that Artemidorus felt the urge to add the strange praise of Geography of our papyrus at the beginning of Book 2 simply because he happened to have crossed the Pyrenees.

There are enough good reasons for doubting that the papyrus offered a complete and continuous text of Artemidorus Book 2. But it can be actually shown that it did not.

F. The Structure of the Papyrus. Part 2

There is an impressively obvious reason why columns i–iii cannot be the proem preceding columns iv–v with the description of the Iberian peninsula: the reason is that the “proem” does not precede those col-umns in the papyrus but rather follows them. The sequence of the columns as reconstructed by Gallazzi/Kramer 1998 has been accepted in all subsequent contributions to the study of this papyrus so far, even by Canfora and his collaborators. The only exception is Nisbet 2009, who, in an extempore intervention at the Oxford conference in 2008, has proposed the inversion of sections a and b+c.37 As I am going to prove, this is indeed the only possible reconstruction. Nisbet’s proposal, however, is not based on the analysis of the physical clues provided by the writing in the papyrus (that indeed have been avowedly disregarded), but simply on a general assessment of the two alternative sequences, and, as such, can have no cogency whatso-ever, especially when compared to that of the editio princeps, where these data had been (albeit mistakenly) taken into account.38

As we have seen above, in the editio princeps the editors identify three discrete sections: a, with the blank space, the agraphon, subsequently fi lled with the drawing of two heads, and the “proem”; b with a small portion of the map on the recto; c the largest section with the map, columns 4–5 and the drawings of

34 M. Pretzler, Strabo’s Cultural Geography, Cambridge 2005:158 and, in greater detail, in a paper on “A Geography of the Sacred? Cults and Sanctuaries in Strabo’s World” given at the Institute of Classical Studies in London on the 26th of March 2009.

35 Stiehle 1856: 197 suggested that the fragments about Massalia and its colonies were part of a general introduction on the colonisation of the West, but that the geographical description itself began with Spain. Hagenow 1932: 128 and n. 8, in reporting Stiehle’s view, stressed the role played by Artemis Ephesia in that context. Hagenow himself (128 f.) argued that Artemidoros may have provided an autobiographical sketch at the beginning of Book 1, and that the fragments on Massalia and its colonies may belong to the description of his journey from Rome to the West. While this aspect of his reconstruction is very questionable (and, at any rate, not verifi able), his comments on the relevance of Artemis Ephesia in this context remain valuable.

36 Cf. Colonna 1962 (on the role played by Artemis Ephesia, via Massalia, in the Western Mediterranean); Ampolo 1970: 207 (Artemidorus as the source of Strabo on Diana Aventinensis); Gras 1997: 66, 68.

37 I have been able to read his contribution and the other ones included in Brodersen/Elsner forthcoming in May 2009 (thanks to the courtesy of the editors), after I had anticipated some of the arguments in support of my reconstruction in D’Alessio 2009.

38 As Nisbet 2009: 23 sums up, the juxtaposition of the fi gures at the end of section c and those at the beginning of section a “is very persuasive”. Nisbet adds (n. 1) that “a counter argument might begin with the spacing of the ink offsets on both sides of P. Artemid. reported by Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis [2008:] 63 as proof of the editors’ preferred sequence; re-examination of the papyrus might be necessary to resolve this”.


feet, hands and heads. We shall see later that they did not mention the fact that at least a bit of c is actually another discrete fragment in itself.

How did they manage to reconstruct the sequence of the sections? The case of b is relatively unimpor-tant, given its small size. There is nothing against its present position. The main problem has to do with the relative position of sections a and c. If we have a close look at what the editors say, and at the material evidence, it is clear that the main reason why section a has been placed before section c is that its text reads as a proem, and must, therefore, have been a proem.

A peculiar physical feature of this roll is mentioned by the editors as being helpful both for the recon-struction of the sequence and for the restoration of the text and the drawings of the recto. The ink of the text and of the recto drawings has left a substantial amount of offset images on the verso, and the reverse is true, to a lesser extent, also of the traces left by the verso on the recto. This is a remarkable feature that so far has only few parallels. A well-known case is the recently published Posidippus papyrus (fi rst presented in 1993), where the editors (who included C. Gallazzi, one of the editors of the Artemidorus papyrus) have made good use of the offset images for reconstruction of the text. From the disposition of the offset traces it is clear in that case that the mirror images were produced after the papyrus had been cut up and used for preparing the cartonnage of a mummy breastplate. In the case of the Artemidorus papyrus it is evident, however, that the offset images were left on the verso when the papyrus was still (at least relatively) undam-aged and rolled. There is only one other known published case of this feature, P.Yale I 19 = P.Ct.YBr inv. 360 (formerly P.Yale inv. 360), a text of Thucydides Book 7, written only on the recto. When it was fi rst published the editors mistook the offset images on the verso as part of undecipherable writing. It was only in 1997 that R. G. Babcock and S. Emmel realised that the traces on the verso were in fact the mirror image left by previous, partly lost columns of the text on the recto.39 It is not unlikely that other similar cases may have been overlooked by the editors of already published papyri.40 The fact that this feature, for which no published example was known before the 1990s, can be identifi ed in the Artemidorus papyrus is of course relevant also for the debate on its authenticity.41

This feature of the Artemidorus papyrus is too noticeable to be missed, and could be of great help for reconstruction of the roll. It turns out, however, that the editors, and all other scholars who have worked on the papyrus so far have badly misjudged its implications. In a rolled papyrus the distance between the original and its offset image must correspond to the circumference of the roll at that point. According to the editio princeps (Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: 63) in section a this circumference was 16 cm, while in section c it ranges from 14 cm to 15 cm. They draw the conclusion 1) that the circumferences increase when moving from right to left; 2) that the mirror images were produced when the papyrus was rolled from the right to the left (i.e. with its fi nal portion in the centre of the roll) and 3) that section a must have preceded section c. All these premises and conclusions are completely wrong.

Let us start with point 2). The offset images of the recto are always to the left of the original ones on the verso. This is only possible if they were produced when the papyrus was rolled from left to right, i.e. with its initial part in the centre of the roll (of course if the papyrus was rolled with the recto inside). The editors’ hypothesis that these mirror images have been produced when the volumen was rolled with its end at the centre (and the recto in the interior part of the roll) is a matter of geometric impossibility. Strangely

39 Babcock/Emmel 1997. 40 A further unpublished case is provided by yet another Thucydides papyrus in the PSI collection (PSI inv. 3870, to be

published by A. López in vol. XVI of the PSI), with the text of Thuc. 1.26.3 on the recto and the mirror image of 1.23.6 on the verso. I am grateful to G. Bastianini for informing me on the existence of this papyrus.

41 L. Vigna in QS 2008: 301–303 maintains that it would be physically impossible for the ink on a papyrus to leave clear offset images of the original letters (as happens in our papyrus), rather than an amorphous blot. The fact that this statement is most clearly contradicted by the mirror images in the Posidippus and Thucydides papyri exempts us from further discussion of this bizarre argument.


enough, this point was already at least implicit in Gallazzi/Kramer 1998: 192 but the editors have ignored it in their later publications.42

Let us move now to point 1): in section c the circumferences increase from around 13.2 cm (col. iv) to around 15.3/15.4 cm in the region of the drawings R16 and R18. Measurements further to the right are uncertain due to the presence of an ancient restoration (and modern re-restoration) of the roll in that sec-tion (corresponding to the drawing R20). In section a, col. i, the circumference starts from around 15.8/15.9 cm.43 It is not possible to take reliable measures to the right of col. i in section a, as the papyrus is fragmen-tary and the relative position of the various parts is unavoidably uncertain.44

As for the editors’ third point: contrary to what they say, the actual evidence implies not only that sec-tion a must have followed section c, but also that it must be placed very close to the right margin of that section, almost in contact with it. In fact its most likely position is incompatible with the editors’ placement of the portion of papyrus with the drawings R22 and R23. In the editio princeps nothing is said about the conjectural nature of this placement but in Gallazzi/Kramer 1998: 193 the authors had clearly stated that this fragment “konnte bisher nirgendwo angesetzt werden”, and that they had placed it where it is now on purely conjectural grounds. It is my opinion, based on my observation of the data, and of the published photographs, that their conjecture was wrong: that section a has to be located there is demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt by a piece of evidence that has incredibly escaped the editors and all scholars who have subsequently worked on the papyrus. One of the drawings of the heads in the so-called agraphon to the left of section a, R2, has left an offset image on the verso on the back of the right-hand section of section c, more or less on the back of R21, as it can be shown by the following image (Fig. 1). To the left is the infra-red image of R2 at the lower left hand extremity of the recto of section a. To the right is a reversed image of the offset traces left by R2 on the lower left hand extremity of the verso of section c (the image of the two seated panthers corresponds to the verso drawing V3). The offset image is clear enough to allow recogniz-ing the eye, the forehead, the nose, the lips, a lock of hair and part of the hem of the garment worn by R2.

The verso image too has left offset traces on the recto, where not only the head of one of the two panthers of V3 can be clearly identifi ed under the right of the nose of R2 but also portions of the animal represented in V2 that are actually lost in the verso are visible.45 It is even possible to read the lost name of the animal, originally written above its back, and now in a gap on the verso. It was not, as the fi rst editors

42 Bastianini forthcoming offers a highly ingenious theoretical reconstruction that would preserve the sequence of the fragments envisaged by the editors while providing an acceptable explanation of the location of the offset images, by supposing that, when the mirror images were produced, the papyrus had been successively rolled fi rst with the verso inside and then with the recto inside, on both occasions in the position following the reading of the roll. My explanation is more straightforward and is the only one that can give account of the presence of the mirror images respectively of R2 on the far left portion of the verso of fragment c, and of V3 on the far left portion of the recto of fragment a. After discussing the issue with me, Bastianini agrees that my explanation is the only one proposed so far that squares with the available evidence. I am very grateful to him for generously sharing the results of his research with me, and for further exchanges on this problem.

43 This is based on the mirror images of the r in propla!/teu!anta col. i 3, the a of eautou, and the fi rst a of -teu!anta in the following line. I have used the measurement tool provided in the CD images in Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008, and the results were always between 15.6 and 15.8 cm. The same operation repeated with the delta of dunameno! in l. 11 gave a result around 15.8. Canfora in QS 2009: 254–264 notices, to his credit, that there is something strange with the way in which the cir-cumferences increase or decrease. But a) his measures are only approximately correct; b) he fails to notice that the position of the mirror images to the left of the originals on the recto is compatible with only one possible way of rolling; c) he fails to infer that the relative position of section a and section c is the key to the solution of the problem. Canfora’s own solution, that this is due to an “‘incidente di percorso’ da parte di chi, con procedimento litografi co, stava dando vita a questa falsifi cazione” (258 n. 11, with reference to L. Vigna’s argument QS 68: 314–317, on which cf. above, n. 41), is even more implausible. Anyway, no “incidente di percorso” is involved, as the geometric background of the sequence of the mirror images is perfectly accounted for by the new reconstruction.

44 This will be clear if we take into account, for example, the distance between the right lower tip of delta in dunameno! in col. i l. 11 and the start of tau’s seriph in th upokeimenh in col. ii l. 11: in the mirror image on the verso, where the papyrus is preserved without interruptions, the distance is around 8.06 cm. If we look at the original sequence on the recto, as it as been reconstructed by the editors, the same distance is around 7.65 cm. This means that in the current reconstruction the fragments have been placed too close to each other.

45 I am grateful to G. Bastianini for pointing this out to me.


had suspected, y[Òa!,46 but a form of krokÒtta! (Fig. 2, where the mirror image, again, has been reversed by me: using the photograph, I cannot make out all the details of every single letter, but there is no doubt that it is one of the variants of this noun).

Section a must therefore be placed immediately to the right of the margin following R21 and almost no portion of papyrus must have been lost in between. The exact distance cannot be worked out on the basis of the papyrus fragments as they appear in the current reconstruction,47 but the distance between the original drawings and their mirror images should be in the region of 15.6 cm.48

As for the position of the small fragment with the drawings R22 and R23, it should probably be moved to the right of section a. Some offset traces visible on the verso above the drawing V34, on the back of column ii, are suggestive of a mirror image of a head with locks of curly hair and, under the verso drawing, three sections of arcs suggesting parts of the chin and the neck (cf. Fig. 3).

The traces look somewhat similar to the head of the drawing R23. They are too uncertain to allow a fi rm interpretation (especially since the original image, in this case would be entirely lost), and their identi-

46 Cf. Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: 331 f. (where the alternative krokÒtta!/krokoÊtta! is mentioned and discarded). What looks as the head of another animal is also visible around 3 cm above the label.

47 It is clear, for example, that the upper part of section a’s left margin should be rotated a few degrees clockwise and moved a few millimeters toward the right (from the point of view of the recto), as it is immediately evident if one looks at the alignment of the name of the fixyuobÒlo! pelekãn under V41 on the verso.

48 The traces of curved lines to the left of the drawing R2 seem to be the continuation of the locks of hair of R21 in the lower portion of the far right margin of section c.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2


fi cation has no bearing to my general argument. If they belong to the mirror image of a lost head, however, this would provide further evidence that “proem” was followed by more drawings of that kind. It is anyway likely that the fragment with R23 should be located in that area.49

The fact that the fi rst measurable distance between the offset images of the recto on the verso in sec-tion c (at the level of col. iv) is around 13.2 cm provides an important clue for working out the length of the portion of the papyrus roll lost to the left of this point. An earlier reference point is provided by the impression left by the verso drawing V25 on the recto (on the map itself): according to my measurement, in this case the distance between the original and its mirror image is ca. cm 12.5.50 This is compatible with the patterns that emerge from the increment of the distances between the offset images left by the ink of the recto on the verso and suggests that the images of the verso have left offset traces on the recto under the same circumstances. The offset traces of V25 are found at a distance of around 40 cm from the left hand margin of the map in fr. c. Comparative evidence provided by other preserved papyrus rolls suggests that such a circumference may have been preceded by around 3 meters (40 cm of which are accounted for by the preserved portion of the map in section c, preceded by an undeterminable portion, to which fr. b presumably belonged).51

The main implication of this is that the roll cannot have been a copy of Artemidorus Book 2. As it is reconstructed here, its recto consists of a map; two columns with an extract from Artemidorus Book 2, with a summary description of the Iberian peninsula; a large unwritten section, that at some stage was fi lled with drawings of feet, hands and heads; three further columns, the fi rst two of which are a general introduction to/praise of Geography. The third column seems to have moved to more concretely physical features, but there is every reason to believe that it was a continuation of the same text represented in the fi rst two col-umns. If my interpretation of the offset traces above V34, at the back of the far right extremity of fr. a (see

49 If this is correct, it would undermine one of the arguments put forward by Nisbet 2009 (on which cf. above, n. 38), that is that of the continuity of the section with the drawing of the heads, since heads would be present both before and after the “proem”.

50 13 cm according to Canfora in QS 2009: 258.51 This estimate is meant to be only very roughly indicative: the exact missing length cannot be calculated with a great

degree of certainty. Cf. the examples collected in D’Alessio 2001: 35–40, in particular 37, for somewhat similar cases; Essler 2008 is an attempt at a more thorough, mathematical treatment of the fragmentary Herculaneum roll.

Fig. 3 (mirror image on V34, and R23 for comparison)


above) is correct, these three columns of text were followed by a further section with drawings (at least two of them, the ‘new’ mirror image and R23, if, as it seems, they are not the same, human heads).

G. What Was The Project Behind The Roll?

Trying to work out the original project behind the book roll is much more diffi cult than reconstructing it, and I have no clear answer to this question. On the recto we have:

1) The Text. This is a series of excerpts relating to geography, separated by ample portions of unwrit-ten papyrus. The fi rst passage is an excerpt from Artemidorus’ Book 2. This may have undergone some modifi cations. One of them is clearly the omission of the connecting particle d° at its beginning. There would have been no point for adding it in the excerpt in Constantine Porphyrogenitos, so we shall have to assume it was already in Marcianus. We cannot be certain it was in Artemidorus as well. In our papyrus the Artemidorus section is certainly not followed by its original continuation, as the so-called “proem” cannot serve this function. We do not know what preceded it, but it is on the whole very likely that we have to do with a collection of excerpts. In this case, the initial connecting particle, if present, would have been excised very easily by the excerptor. A further change due to the excerptor may well be the addition of ≤ !Êmpa!a x≈ra, though this has by no means quite the same degree of probability. As far as I can see, in all other cases the text of the papyrus is more likely to refl ect the original Artemidorus than the Byzantine excerpt does. We cannot be sure, however, that no further change or attempt to update Artemidorus has crept into the papyrus text, in the same way that we cannot be entirely sure that the whole formulation of the descrip-tion §n §pitom∞i introduced in col. v 14–15 by the words lhcÒmeya ... §n §pitom∞i should attributed to Artemidorus himself (as it is still quite possible) or to a later abridger. The section reaches its conclusion at the end of the second column (column v), and the width of the two columns has probably been chosen exactly with this effect in mind.

The second passage belongs to a different author, quite possibly an unknown one judging from the level of his style and of his mastery of the language. It has been suggested that he may have been the scribe himself, but I doubt it. Clumsy and strange as it may seem, the whole business of arranging this papyrus roll must have been a fairly costly and time-consuming enterprise, and I do not think that the scribe would have wished to add his own experiments at this stage. The text might perhaps be due to the person who had commissioned the project, or to some minor, perhaps local scholar (the two fi gures might have been, of course, identical). The level of the text does not suggest that it would have enjoyed a long manuscript trans-mission after its composition. One of the strange words used by our author is a compound of pla!teÊv, and, as we have seen above,52 these and related words are attested only in Egypt. This might suggest an Egyptian origin of the author. The verb, however, might have been used in the same sense for describing the construction of clay or mud walls elsewhere (in the Mediterranean and the Near East) and the lack of evidence can be simply due to a lack of similar documents from other regions.

2) The Map. There is no way to identify the territory it represents, as it is a ‘silent map’, with no sign of writing (apart from a few lacunose numbers at the lower left hand margin of fr. b), and we do not even understand its scale. It certainly does not refer to the following portion of text, that with the description of Spain. The description there is organised as a paraplous, and gives distances between coastal places (including those on the Atlantic estuaries, that could be easily reached by boat). The map, on the other hand, is centred on a river or a river system, and there is no obvious trace of a coastline such as that of the Iberian Peninsula. According to the editors’ reconstruction, the most plausible conclusion is that the map (sandwiched between the ‘proem’ and the description of Spain) had been inserted in that position by mis-take. With my alternative reconstruction it becomes possible that its function was explained in a portion of text preceding it. It might have been the representation of a territory described in a preceding lost portion of text (e.g. the delta of the Rhone?), but there is no way to prove or disprove it. Or, as it has also been sug-

52 Cf. p. 31.


gested, it may rather be a sketch for a pictorial landscape, such as that of the fl ooded Nile, underlying the famous Palestrina mosaic.

3) The Recto Drawings. This is the only part of the roll that seems to have no relation at all with geog-raphy, unless we are ready to think that it might have been inspired by the comparisons between geogra-phy (and, indeed, historiography) and kolossourgia in Strabo, or between chorography, geography and the drawing of parts of the human body in Ptol. Geogr. 1.1.3–4 (the latter quoted in editio princeps, p. 469). It is not clear that these drawings were an original feature of the project. The fi rst editors’ idea was that the blank space was meant to be fi lled by a further map, which, for some reason, was never inserted, and that the drawings may be due to a later re-usage of the roll. We have to keep in mind, at any rate, that drawings may have occupied also a further blank space following the so-called proem (i.e. if my hypothesis on the mirror image on V34 is correct: see above, p. 39–41), and that the papyrus was still used and restored after the heads had been drawn (noted already in the editio princeps).

4) The Verso Drawings. These do seem to belong to a coherent project, a bestiary of the “(animals living) in (or by) the Ocean, and the terrestrial ones, and the winged ones, (…) and the sea-monsters (or cetaceans)”, as indicated by what looks as a general handwritten label (V30). If we keep in mind that the one section of Artemidorus preserved on the recto describes one of the extreme regions of the oikoumene, bordering with the Ocean, and that the animals drawn on the verso are almost all exotic ones from far away zones, a connection between the two sides of the roll (which would, then, have been meant as an opisthograph roll) within a more general project does not seem unlikely. One of Canfora’s collaborators, S. Micunco has drawn attention to the fact that at least two of the animal/animal groups drawn on the verso (the struggle of the elephant and the snake and the lion-like winged myrmex) seem to have appeared also in another book of Artemidorus (cf. Strabo 16.4.15, on the myrmex, and 16.4.16 on the elephant: both pas-sages deal with Arabia, and in both cases Strabo seems to have used Artemidorus, who, in his turn, used Agatharchides).53 This should not be dismissed as irrelevant (though, differently from Micunco, I do not see that this contributes in any way to the hypothesis that the drawings are the work of Simonides). This may be a coincidence, but I do think more likely than not that the Text, the Map, and the Verso Drawings are likely to belong to a more or less coherent project, not in the sense that the verso provides an illustration of the text on the recto, but in that both share the same interest for geography/paradoxography. I am much less sure about what to think about the Recto Drawings.

In conclusion, based on the available evidence, the theory that this papyrus is a forgery has proved to be, by far, the most implausible hypothesis.54 It is an extremely unusual and, in several respects, awkward papyrus roll that undoubtedly deserves further scrutiny, and which still offers many unsolved problems. It tells us more about the reception and the transformation of high-end geographical research and artistic representation than about its production. Its singularity and awkwardness, though, are of great potential interest for the study of ancient attitudes toward geography and paradoxography, as well as, and probably even more, for the study of Greco-Roman visual culture.

Bibliographical Abbreviations

Ampolo 1970: C. Ampolo, L’Artemide di Marsiglia e la Diana dell’Aventino, Parola del Passato 25: 200–210– 2008: Id., Onori per Artemidoro di Efeso: la statua di bronzo ‘dorata’, Parola del Passato 63: 361–370Babcock/Emmel 1997: R. G. Babcock and S. Emmel, A Mirror Text of Thukydides VII 33–35, APF 43: 239–245Bastianini forthcoming: G. Bastianini, Sull’avvolgimento del rotolo di Artemidoro, forthcoming in APF (Festschrift

G. Poethke)

53 Cf. S. Micunco in Canfora 2008a: 183–188. 54 Cf. above, p. 30–34. One of the arguments adduced in favour of the forgery hypothesis was that the papyrus presents

itself as a complete text: cf. Canfora in QS 2009: 261 and n. 14, according to whom, the papyrus “voleva apparire ‘completo’: dal proemio che spiega ab ovo cosa sia la geografi a, all’ultimo, malconcio rigo (…) con una frase evidentemente conclusiva”. Based on the same assumption, the fact that the papyrus now turns out not having ever presented itself as a ‘complete’ text might be taken as a further argument against the forgery theory.


Billerbeck 2009: M. Billerbeck, Artemidorus’ Geographoumena in the Ethnika of Stephanus of Byzantium, in Brodersen/Elsner forthcoming: 73–97

Brodersen/Elsner forthcoming: K. Brodersen and J. Elsner (eds), Images and Texts on the “Artemidorus Papyrus”, Working Papers (St John’s College, Oxford 2008)

Canfora 2007: L. Canfora, The True History of the So-called Artemidorus Papyrus, Bari– 2008a: Id., Il papiro di Artemidoro, Bari– 2008b: Id., The True History of the So-called Artemidorus Papyrus, re-published with a Supplement, Bari.Canfora/Bossina 2008: L. Canfora and L. Bossina, Wie kann das ein Artemidor-Papyrus sein? Ma come fa a essere

un papiro di Artemidoro?, BariCanfora 2009: L. Canfora, Artemidorus Ephesius. P. Artemid. sive Artemidorus personatus, edidit brevique com-

mentario instruxit Societas emunctae naris, curante L. C., BariColonna 1962: G. Colonna, Sull’origine del culto di Diana Aventinensis, Parola del Passato 17: 57–60D’Alessio 2001: G. B. D’Alessio, Danni materiali e ricostruzione di rotoli papiracei: le Elleniche di Ossirinco (POxy

842) e altri esempi, ZPE 134: 23–41– 2009: Id., review of Settis 2008 in L’Indice dei libri del mese, 2009 n. 4 (April): 7Essler 2008: H. Essler, Rekonstruktion von Papyrusrollen auf mathematischer Grundlage, Cronache Ercolanesi 38:

273–307Faria 1987: A. Marques de Faria, Moedas de chumbo, da época roman, cunhadas no actual território portugués. A

propósito do Catálogo de Plomos Monetiformes de la Hispania Antigua, Numismatica 47: 24–28– 1987–1988: Id., Ipses, uma ceca hispano-romana do Sudoeste, ActaNum 17–18: 101–104– 1995: Id., Moedas sa época romana cunhadas em território actualmente português, ANEJOS AespA 14: 143–153Gallazzi/Kramer 1998: C. Gallazzi and B. Kramer, Artemidor im Zeichensaal: Eine Papyrusrolle mit Text, Land-

karte und Skizzenbüchern aus späthellenistischer Zeit, APF 44: 189–208Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008: C. Gallazzi, B. Kramer and S. Settis (eds), Il Papiro di Artemidoro (P. Artemid.),

MilanGallazzi/Settis 2006: C. Gallazzi and S. Settis (eds), Le tre vite del papiro di Artemidoro. Voci e sguardi dall’Egitto

Greco-romano, MilanGras 1997: M. Gras, L’Occidente e i suoi confl itti, in S. Settis (ed.), I Greci. Storia Cultura Arte Società. 2. Una

storia greca. II. Defi nizione, Turin: 61–85Hagenow 1932: G. Hagenow, Untersuchungen zu Artemidors Geographie des Westens, Diss. Göttingen.Hammerstaedt forthcoming a: J. Hammerstaedt, Artemidoro di Efeso nella tradizione indiretta e nel papiro di

Torino, forthcoming in C. Gallazzi, B. Kramer and S. Settis (eds), Intorno al papiro di Artemidoro. I. Lingua, stile e contesto culturale, Milan 2009

– forthcoming b: Id., Warum Simonides den Artemidorpapyrus nicht hätte fälschen können: Eine seltene Schrei-bung für Tausender in Inschriften und Papyri, forthcoming in Chiron 39 (2009)

Hoffmann 1838: S. F. W. Hoffmann, Die Iberer im Westen und Osten, Leipzig 1838Nisbet 2009: G. Nisbet, P. Artemid.: The Sequence of the Fragments, in Brodersen/Elsner forthcoming: 19–23Obbink 2009: D. Obbink, P. Artemid.: The artefact, in Brodersen/Elsner forthcoming: 11–18Parsons 2009: P. Parsons, P. Artemid.: A Papyrologist’s View, in Brodersen/Elsner forthcoming: 31–38QS 2008: Quaderni di Storia 68 (luglio-dicembre 2008): 214–318QS 2009: Quaderni di Storia 69 (gennaio-giugno 2009): 241–397Rathbone (1991): D. Rathbone, Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-Century Egypt. The Heroninos

Archive and the Appianus Estate. CambridgeSettis 2008: S. Settis, Artemidoro: un papiro dal I secolo al XXI, TurinSoldati 2006: A. Soldati, TÚ kaloÊmenon parakÊÛ!ma. Le forme del sampi nei papiri, APF 52: 209–217Stiehle 1856: R. Stiehle, Der Geograph Artemidorus von Ephesos, Philologus 11: 193–244Wessely 1885: C. Wessely, Lettre à M. E. Revillout sur les contrats grecs du Louvre provenant de Faioum, Revue

égyptologique 3.4: 161–183.

Giambattista D’Alessio, Department of Classics, King’s College, London WC2R 2LS, United KingdomGiambattista.d’[email protected]

ON THE “ARTEMIDORUS” PAPYRUS

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