Pytheas
Ancient Greek explorer · France · Historical Figures · Lived 359 BC to 289 BC · aged 70
Pytheas is read about 394 times a day, in 57 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
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Something wrong?A Greek navigator from Marseille sailed into the Arctic in 325 BC and came back with reports no one believed: midnight sun, polar ice, islands where summer nights lasted minutes. His book is lost, but centuries of geographers kept citing him anyway.
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About this person
Pytheas set out from the Greek colony of Massalia around 325 BC and pushed north into waters no Mediterranean scholar had charted. He circumnavigated much of the British Isles, became the first Greek to witness and document the Arctic, and recorded observations of Celtic and Germanic peoples along the way. He described the midnight sun, connected the moon to the tides, and introduced the idea of Thule - a distant northern land that would haunt maps for two thousand years. The phenomena he reported, like frigid zones and summers with almost no darkness, had been theorized but never seen. His account circulated widely in antiquity and other writers quoted it for centuries, but the original text has not survived.
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