What the Romans Saw When They Reached New Parts of the World: Hear First-Hand Accounts by Appian, Pliny, Tacitus & Other Ancient Historians

If you real­ly want to impress your fam­i­ly, friends, and social-media fol­low­ing with your next voy­age abroad, con­sid­er book­ing a trip to Thule. But where, exact­ly, is it? It could be Ice­land or Green­land with­in the Orkney arch­i­pel­ago of north­ern Scot­land; it could be the Eston­ian island of Saare­maa; it could be the Nor­we­gian island of Smøla. To under­stand the loca­tion of the much-mythol­o­gized Thule for your­self — and more so, its mean­ing — you should con­sult not sources nor mod­ern but ancient, or at least medieval. That’s the modus operan­di of the video above from Voic­es of the Past, which spends an hour and 45 min­utes gath­er­ing his­tor­i­cal impres­sions of not just Thule, but every extrem­i­ty of the known world reached by the Roman Empire.

To much of human­i­ty in antiq­ui­ty, “the known world” was more or less a syn­onym for the ter­ri­to­ry of the Roman Empire. It was through the exer­tions of that mighty empire’s adven­tures, traders, and mil­i­tary men that, with time, the world to the north, east, west, and south of Rome itself became ever more “known,” and it is along those four car­di­nal direc­tions that this video orga­nized its tales.

Telling of expe­di­tions “beyond Carthage,” it draws upon the words of ancient his­to­ri­ans Appi­an of Alexan­dria, Poly­bius, and Arri­an of Nico­me­dia; telling of the Roman pur­suit of the trade-route “incense trails,” it brings in the Greek poly­math Stra­bo as well as the King James Bible. Accounts of such even far­ther-flung places as the source of the Nile and the forests of Ger­ma­nia come from Pliny the Elder and the Roman Emper­or Augus­tus.

This is all in keep­ing with the ori­en­ta­tion toward pri­ma­ry sources of Voic­es of the Past, a Youtube chan­nel pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for videos on Niko­la Tes­la’s pre­dic­tions for the world of 2026, Pla­to’s cre­ation of the myth of Atlantis, ancient Japan as described by ancient Japan­ese, and the Roman Empire as described by an ancient Chi­nese his­to­ri­an. How­ev­er you define it, Rome nev­er con­sti­tut­ed the entire world, nor even the entire­ty of the civ­i­lized world. But no pre­vi­ous civ­i­liza­tion had ever made such a con­sis­tent effort to push its bound­aries out­ward, reach­ing — and, if pos­si­ble, mas­ter­ing — dis­tant realms of seem­ing­ly fan­tas­ti­cal beasts, unfath­omable land­scapes, and unin­hab­it­able cli­mates. We might do well to imag­ine that it was just such places (or at least the Roman per­cep­tion of those places) best sym­bol­ized by Thule, though whether you trust Plutarch, Jose­phus, or Tac­i­tus’ descrip­tion of it is up to you.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Most Dis­tant Places Vis­it­ed by the Romans: Africa, Scan­di­navia, Chi­na, India, Ara­bia & Oth­er Far-Flung Lands

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.