(You can read about Operation Read Those Books here.)
Today I dug back into the tale of The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, by Barry Cunliffe, about a Greek explorer who managed to make it all the way to Britain around the year 325 B.C.
I picked this up as research for a book set in ancient Greece, and put it down once I actually started writing said book.
But it's a well-researched look into an interesting time: a time when you might be able to buy exotic goods in your city market - but also a time when no one in your city might have ever been to the lands those exotic goods came from - they might even not be quite sure where those exotic lands were. Merchant passed item on to merchant across trade routes hundreds of miles long, but no one merchant necessarily made the journey from one end of the trade route to the other.
But Pytheas . . . Pytheas decided to go as far as he could go, and maybe ended up getting as far north as Iceland, making discoveries all along the way.
Today, I read Chapter 3, "Escape from the Mediterranean". Apparently it was actually easier and faster to get to the Atlantic overland than through the straits.
That's it for today!
-Jessica Snell
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