[Strabo:] Eratosthenes does not do well in this way: he cites too much from men who aren’t worth citing, sometimes reproaching them and sometimes believing them and proclaiming them to be witnesses, such as Damastes and others like him. For even if they say something true, one must not use them as witnesses to that, and one must not trust them because of that. Instead one must use only worthy men in this way, who have told many things well, and even if they leave out many things or don’t explain sufficiently, have never lied. But using Damastes as a witness is no different from calling as witness the Bergaian Euhemeros, and others whom he [Eratosthenes] has cited while refuting their foolishness.
He tells one of his [Damastes’] follies, that he understood the Arabian gulf to be a lake, and that Diotimos son of Strombichos, leading an Athenian embassy by sailing up the Kydnos out of Kilikia into the Choaspes river, which flows by Sousa, arrived at Sousa on the fortieth day. He [Damastes] was told this by Diotimos himself. Then he wonders how it was possible for the Kydnos to cut across the Euphrates and Tigris and empty into the Choaspes.
Author: Damastes
Title of Work: On Events in Hellas (Περὶ τῶν ἐν Ἑλλάδι γενομένων), most likely, or perhaps Catalog of Nations and Cities (Ἐθνῶν κατάλογος καὶ πόλεων)
Location in Work: Strabo 1.3.1 Radt
Date of Work: c. 420 BCE
Original Language: Greek (Attic, as relayed)
Original Text:
οὐδὲ τοῦτ᾽ εὖ Ἐρατοσθένης, ὅτι ἀνδρῶν οὐκ ἐξίων μνήμης ἐπὶ πλέον μέμνηται, τὰ μὲν ἐλέγχων τὰ δὲ πιστεύων καὶ μάρτυσι χρώμενος αὐτοῖς, οἷον Δαμάστῃ καὶ τοιούτοις ἄλλοις. καὶ γὰρ εἴ τι λέγουσιν ἀληθές, οὐ μάρτυσί γε ἐκείνοις χρηστέον περὶ αὐτοῦ, οὐδὲ πιστευτέον διὰ τοῦτο: ἀλλ᾽ ἐπὶ τῶν ἀξιολόγων ἀνδρῶν μόνων τῷ τοιούτῳ τρόπῳ χρηστέον, οἳ πολλὰ μὲν εἰρήκασιν εὖ, πολλὰ δὲ καὶ παραλελοίπασιν ἢ οὐχ ἱκανῶς ἐξεῖπον, οὐδὲν δ᾽ ἐψευσμένως. ὁ δὲ Δαμάστῃ χρώμενος μάρτυρι οὐδὲν διαφέρει τοῦ καλοῦντος μάρτυρα τὸν Βεργαῖον Εὐήμερον καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους, οὓς αὐτὸς εἴρηκε διαβάλλων τὴν φλυαρίαν. καὶ τούτου δ᾽ ἕνα τῶν λήρων αὐτὸς λέγει, τὸν μὲν Ἀράβιον κόλπον λίμνην ὑπολαμβάνοντος εἶναι, Διότιμον δὲ τὸν Στρομβίχου πρεσβείας Ἀθηναίων ἀφηγούμενον διὰ τοῦ Κύδνου ἀναπλεῦσαι ἐκ τῆς Κιλικίας ἐπὶ τὸν Χοάσπην ποταμόν, ὃς παρὰ τὰ Σοῦσα ῥεῖ, καὶ ἀφικέσθαι τεσσαρακοσταῖον εἰς Σοῦσα· ταῦτα δὲ αὐτῷ διηγήσασθαι αὐτὸν τὸν Διότιμον. εἶτα θαυμάζειν, εἰ τὸν Εὐφράτην καὶ τὸν Τίγριν ἦν δυνατὸν διακόψαντα τὸν Κύδνον εἰς τὸν Χοάσπην ἐκβαλεῖν.
Reference Edition: Radt, Geographika
Source of Date of Work: See commentary
Commentary:
This story is included in this collection because it provides supporting evidence indicating that the Arimaspeia described a place named Arabia. The story is bizarre and hard to understand, as we do not possess either Damastes’ original version or Eratosthenes’ original critique, and Strabo’s retelling is too cursory to serve as a basis for a confident reconstruction. Another fragment of Damastes preserved on a papyrus scrap (to come in this collection) appears to be related and might yield helpful clues, but has not yet been sufficiently studied. As told by Strabo, the story raises several questions that need to be addressed individually:
First, assuming that the reported Athenian mission led by Diotimos to Sousa is historical and not a mere fiction, what could have been its actual route? Scholars tackling this problem (reviewed by Virgilio Costa in his commentary to BNJ 5 F8) have mostly decided that the preserved itinerary element of sailing up the Kydnos river (modern Berdan, in southern Turkey) must be an error, and have instead reconstructed an itinerary that made a stop at the Kydnos before crossing south over the Mediterranean, sailing up the Nile, using a Persian canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea (known as the Arabian sea to ancient Greeks), and then sailing around the Arabian peninsula, up the Persian gulf and up the Choaspes river (modern Karkheh) to Sousa (modern Shush, in southwest Iran). It is also possible to reconstruct a route that included sailing up the Kydnos if the mission disembarked and left their ship at the Kilikian city of Tarsos, traveled by land from there to the Euphrates river, and then sailed down the Euphrates to the Persian gulf, and from there up the Choaspes. But such a route would not involve the Red Sea.
Second, what was the route described by Damastes? As Strabo retells Damastes’ story, Damastes claimed Diotimos sailed up the Kydnos and out of Kilikia, which is an impossibility, as the Kydnos’ sources are within Kilikia, on the southern banks of the Tauros mountains. After that, Diotimos somehow sailed into the Choaspes, which has its sources in the Zagros mountains, more than 1200 km southeast of the Kydnos. And for some unexplained reason, Strabo, citing Eratosthenes, reported in accompaniment with this story that Damastes thought the Arabian gulf (i.e. Red Sea) was a lake (i.e. closed, but not necessarily freshwater).
This leads us to a third question: what could Damastes’ notion of an Arabian lake have to do with his notion that the upper Kydnos connected to the Choaspes? The answer must lie in a rarely mentioned country of Arabia that was believed to be in central or eastern Anatolia or the south Caucasus. Xenophon of Athens mentioned such a country three times in the Kyropaideia (7.4.16; 7.5.14; 8.6.7), in all cases grouping it with Phrygia and Kappadokia. Pliny the Elder repeated referred to upper Mesopotamia as Arabia and to its people as Arabian (5.20/85; 6.9/25; 6.30/117-118; 6.31/128-130). The tragic play Prometheus Bound, which includes a mythical topography largely drawn from the Arimaspeia, includes a city called Arabia in the mountains near the Caucasus.
Damastes presumably thought of Arabia as being located somewhere near Kilikia, agreeing much better with Xenophon and Pliny than with Prometheus Bound. The ‘Arabian lake’ that somehow figured in Damastes’ retelling of Diotimos’ route must have been located in that Arabian country, even if only in Damastes’ understanding.
Fourth and finally, who is the unnamed ‘he’ who ‘wonders how it was possible for the Kydnos to cut across the Euphrates and Tigris and empty into the Choaspes.’? Grammatically this ‘he’ should refer to Damastes, since he was referred to by the previous unnamed ‘he.’ In that case Damastes might have merely misunderstood the route, without actually believing the route as he understood it was possible. Or Strabo might have switched to referring to Eratosthenes without signaling so, which would mean Damastes believed the impossible route and Eratosthenes was either puzzled or sarcastic.
The route in Damastes’ mind might have been less obviously impossible if it connected the upper Kydnos via the Arabian lake to the Euphrates, and from that river via the Persian gulf to the Choaspes, rather than directly from the Arabian lake to the Choaspes. Damastes might also have been confusing the Kydnos with the Pyramos (modern Ceyhan), a river that crosses the Tauros mountains into Kilikia from sources northeast of Kilikia closer to the Euphrates, though it is by no means navigable up that far.
In any case, this story is evidence that Damastes, like Xenophon and Pliny after him, believed in a country in central or eastern Anatolia called Arabia. And this is relevant because we also know that Damastes read and relied on the Arimaspeia for another of his works. The above-mentioned papyrus scrap (to come in this collection), from a scholarly commentary on an unknown work, intriguingly mentions Damastes, Arabia, Issedones and probably Persia and the Persian gulf.
Diotimos’ mission has been dated to the 430s or 450s BCE (Costa, op. cit.), and Strabo’s report that Damastes claimed to have spoken with Diotimos personally about his route is the most reliable information we have with which to date Damastes and his work. Other, less reliable sources make him a contemporary of Herodotos and either older or younger than Hellanikos of Lesbos, who was still writing in the last decade of the 5th century BCE (See Costa’s biographical essay to BNJ 5 and Frances Powell’s biographical essay to BNJ 4). To avoid giving a false impression that the chronological order of Herodotos, Damastes and Hellanikos is known, the fragments of Damastes and Hellanikos included in this collection are assigned the same estimated date as Herodotos’ Histories. The range of possible dates for Damastes’ and Hellanikos’ works is however much wider.
Concordance: BNJ/FGrH Damastes (5) F8