Pomponius Mela

Pomponius Mela was a Roman geographer of the first century CE. His De situ orbis is a concise Latin description of the lands and seas known to Romans.

De situ orbis: A Latin geographical work by Pomponius Mela describing the lands and seas known to Romans. This is Mela’s surviving work and the source of his reputation.
Circumnavigation of Africa: A voyage around Africa, known in antiquity through reports and geographic traditions. Mela uses the reported encirclement of Africa to frame the southern limits of the known world.
Eratosthenes: A Greek scholar who measured Earth’s circumference and developed influential geographic ideas in the third century BCE. His work helped establish the geographic tradition inherited by Roman authors such as Mela.
Aethiopia: An ancient geographical name applied broadly to regions south of Egypt, especially parts of northeast Africa. Mela’s account of Aethiopia illustrates how ancient geography grouped distant southern lands.
Geography in ancient Rome: The study and description of places, regions, and the inhabited world in Roman antiquity. Mela’s account belongs to Rome’s broader tradition of geographic writing.
Mediterranean Sea: The sea connected to the Atlantic by the Strait of Gibraltar and bordered by Europe, Africa, and Asia. Mela’s geographic survey treats the Mediterranean as its central organizing sea.
Strabo: A Greek geographer whose Geography describes the known world and its peoples. Strabo provides a larger, near-contemporary comparison for Mela’s compressed account.
Thule: A name used by ancient writers for a far-northern land whose exact location remains uncertain. Mela includes Thule as a limit-point in his description of the northern world.
Oikoumene: The inhabited world as understood in ancient Greek and Roman geography. Mela organizes his account around the known inhabited world.
Strait of Gibraltar: The narrow passage linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. Mela begins his circuit of the world at the passage between these two seas.

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