Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

And then when you're talking about Europe, there is almost nothing like that.

I mean, the Greeksters are fundamentally not very interested and knowledgeable about inland Europe.

So they don't go very far north beyond the settlements on the sea that you mentioned on Massilia, Emporion in Iberia and a couple of other places.

And he mentions actually this one Samian trader who went all the way to essentially Baetica, the Roman provinces.

So he went beyond the Pillars of Hercules out into the Atlantic and then traded with a kingdom that had never been opened up essentially to Greek trade.

It's southern Spain.

The name escapes me now, the actual Greek name.

But fundamentally, he's trading with this kingdom that no one's ever touched.

And so he came back.

Is this Tartessos?

Tartessos.

Right.

So he arrives in this place, Tartessos, and makes a killing, essentially, because they'd never interacted, never traded with the Greeks.

And so he got to sell his cargo for immense prices.

And so he says that's one of the people who came back with the biggest haul ever, right?

So he's interested in people who are sort of trying to push those boundaries.

but he himself struggles to articulate that.

And there's this really interesting anecdote where he clearly shows the extent of his knowledge and the limits of his knowledge and the extent of his ignorance when he says that north of the Thracians, there's a Danube, the Ister, and you can't live north of there because of bees.

If you wanted to know what kind of bees these are, Herodotus doesn't know.

Yeah, in fact, that's how he starts his story, right?