Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936)

Update: I have included links to the posts in the list of chapters. I may include links to other books that tie in with the chapter posts (such as N. M. Penzer’s essay on Poison Damsels) as I get to them.

I’m listening to The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World’s Greatest Empire by Anthony Everitt and it references peripli that are the subjects of essays in Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel. See this post for a link to a biography on Kaeppel as well as the post that alerted me to the book at Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog. From the dustjacket cover:

These essays are based, in the main, upon the author’s reading when working in the British Museum. Mr. Carl Kaeppel, who is well known in the world of classical scholarship, has, among his unusually wide intellectual activities, always taken a special interest in ancient geography, on which he is an authority. The section of his book which is devoted to Hanno’s ‘Periplus’ is therefore an outstanding piece of scholarship as well as being a graphic picture of what was to the ancients a world of mystery and magic, and is interesting to readers either with or without a special classical training. The other studies range over a number of little-known but extra-ordinarily interesting aspects and activities of the world of antiquity, and all have been very highly praised by scholars.

The chapters:

• Gais Iulius Solinus, a Teller of Wonder-Tales
• The Periplus of Hanno
• Aristarchus of Samos, the Copernicus of Antiquity
• Periplus of the Red, or Erythraen, Sea
• Some Early Greeks on India
• Pytheas and Massilia
• Poison-Damsels and the Pseudo-Aristotle
• The Periplus of Scylax

What I’d like to do over the next few months is post on each essay individually. Up first is Gaius Iulius Solinus: A Teller of Wonder-Tales…in the next post (by the weekend, I hope)…