First Century C.E.
Geographer

Survey of the World. Pomponius Mela, from Tingentera in the south of Spain, near Gibraltar, probably wrote his geographical work De chorographia sometime after 43 C.E. Geographical writers in Latin were a rarity during the Roman period, although authors such as Tacitus and Pliny dabbled in the subject. As is the case both with Strabo's geography in Greek and with later writers in Latin (such as Pliny the Elder), Mela was uninterested in the details of mathematical geography. He was a compiler of physical geography and ethnographical knowledge of his time. De chorographia is divided into three books. The first book is an overview of the earth's northern and southern hemispheres, and in it Mela revisits Crates' notion (advanced in the second century B.C.E.) that the earth is divided into five zones, only two of which are inhabited. (Mela...