Periplus Maris Erythraei — interactive comparison

The Periplus Maris Erythraei — an open comparative edition

The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Περίπλους τῆς Ἐρυθρᾶς Θαλάσσης) is a first-century merchant's guide to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Arabian coast, East Africa as far as Rhapta, and India as far as the Ganges. Its 66 chapters survive in a single ninth- or tenth-century codex at Heidelberg — Palatinus graecus 398 — from which every printed edition ultimately descends.

This site presents a four-way comparison. The public-facing text is Müller's Greek (1855) paired with Schoff's English translation (1912) and Brodersen's German translation (2021). Casson's Princeton edition (1989) remains in copyright and is therefore offered only as a gated apparatus: lemma-level citations you can reveal on demand for scholarly comparison, under fair-use principles, never as a continuous text.

Editions Why these comparisons Mitigation & fair use Manuscript evidence How to use this page Acknowledgements Jump to a chapter

The four editions

Müller — Greek (1855)

public domainbase text

Karl Müller, Geographi Graeci Minores I (Paris: Didot, 1855), supplied here in the TLG-encoded XML distributed by First1KGreek. Preferred as the base text because it is openly licensed, canonically citable (stable TLG URNs, chapter divisions used in the scholarly tradition), and 170 years of commentary refer back to its paragraphing.

Schoff — English (1912)

public domaintranslation

Wilfred H. Schoff, The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (New York: Longmans, Green, 1912), reproduced from the ToposText digitisation. The only pre-1929 English translation of scholarly quality. Schoff translated from Fabricius 1883 rather than Müller, so his English inherits textual choices that differ from our base Greek — and, in a small number of places, drifts into outright error.

Brodersen — German (2021)

by permissiontranslation

Kai Brodersen, Periplus Maris Erythraei / Reise durch das Rote Meer (Wiesbaden: Marix, 2021), reproduced here by the kind permission of the translator. Brodersen's Greek text and facing German translation represent the modern critical consensus; his Greek closely tracks Casson's readings, so the German serves as a calibration line against which Schoff's deviations can be judged.

Casson — Greek & English (1989)

in copyrightapparatus only

Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton University Press, 1989). The standard modern critical edition; in copyright to PUP until 2085. Not licensed for reproduction here. Short lemma-level citations appear in the apparatus only after the reader clicks through a fair-use acknowledgement, and are never used as a continuous text.

Why these comparisons

The apparatus carries four comparisons, each answering a different scholarly question:

Müller ⇄ Casson (Greek). 422 substantive word-level variants are flagged. Müller 1855 prints the Palatinus largely as transmitted, including its obvious corruptions; Casson 1989 incorporates 134 years of conjecture, collation, and papyrological comparison. Seeing Müller and Casson side by side makes the modern consensus visible as a set of specific textual choices (for instance κόσμου → κόλπου at §30, μεστά → μεγάλα at §56, καλουμένη → κλειομένη at §63) rather than as an anonymous scholarly voice.

Schoff ⇄ Müller (English deviations). 74 places where Schoff's English departs from Müller's Greek, classified by cause: inherited textual variants from Fabricius 1883 (the Greek he was actually reading), anglicised proper nouns, interpretive lexical choices, and — at §11 and §21 — outright translation errors (λίβανος as "cinnamon"; ὥρας as "days"). The flagging separates witness disagreement from translator fault.

Brodersen ⇄ Müller (German deviations). 30 places where Brodersen's German departs from Müller's Greek; almost all inherited from his (Casson-aligned) Greek text rather than from the translator. Brodersen is the calibration line: when Schoff and Brodersen disagree on the same passage, the disagreement almost always reflects the century between Fabricius 1883 and Casson 1989.

Translators ⇄ headline glosses. 20 "headline" loci where a Casson-English gloss clarifies how the modern consensus Greek would read in English. These are pre-pulled from Casson's translation under fair use as short lemma-level quotations, and sit at the top of each chapter's apparatus so a reader can see the modern sense of the passage without reproducing the modern edition.

Mitigation strategy and fair-use position

The copyright constraint is asymmetric: Müller and Schoff are free, Brodersen is licensed to us, Casson is not. The mitigation strategy is documentary rather than textual — everything that the reader would otherwise lose by not having Casson on the page is pointed to in an open apparatus. Specifically:

Casson's Greek is not typeset as a column; instead, every reading that differs from Müller is flagged as a Müller ⇄ Casson variant, word for word, with ten words of surrounding Greek context so the locus is unambiguous.
Casson's English is not reproduced; where his rendering materially clarifies a difficult passage, a short gloss appears in the apparatus under fair use, always keyed to a specific Greek lemma.
All Casson citations are blurred by default. Revealing them requires an explicit click-through acknowledgement that they are consulted for scholarship, commentary, and criticism, never as a substitute for the printed edition.
Every disputed reading in the apparatus is backed by the Palatinus folio that carries it — each chapter view includes the image(s) of the exact folio, clickable to enlarge, so the reader can test any editor's choice against the manuscript itself.

Brodersen's Greek text is covered by the same permission as his German, but it exists only on paper; we therefore use the TLG/Müller Greek digitally and note Brodersen's Greek readings in the apparatus where they bear on a disputed locus.

Manuscript witnesses

Heidelberg, Universitätsbibliothek, Palatinus graecus 398 (9th–10th c.) — the sole independent witness. The Periplus occupies ff. 40v–54v. Heidelberg has imaged the codex under an open licence, and each chapter on this site carries the folio image(s) that carry its text — 93 folio crops in all, with exact folio labels drawn from the Numbers collation. Original imaging: digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpgraec398.

British Library, Add. MS 19391 (14th–15th c.) — a late apograph of the Palatinus, of value only at the handful of loci where its reading is independently cited. Catalogue and imaging: bl.uk · Add. MS 19391.

How to use this page

Navigation. Click any chapter below, use the §-dropdown in the header, or press ←/→ (or j/k) to walk through the text. Esc returns to this home tab.
Columns. Toggle any of the four translation/edition columns in the toolbar. Brodersen's Greek is off by default but available; turning it on is useful when investigating a disputed reading.
Apparatus. Toggle the three apparatus layers — Müller⇄Casson variants, translation deviations, headline glosses — to produce either a lean reading view or a full critical view.
Casson. Click Reveal Casson apparatus… in the toolbar and confirm the fair-use notice; the blurred Casson lines become readable. Click again to re-hide.
Sharing. The URL updates with #ch=n, so any chapter is directly linkable.

Acknowledgements

This page is inspired by working with Andrea Nanetti in building the Periplus edition for Engineering Historical Memory. Data collection was carried out by Ching-Yuan Wu with the following volunteer collaborators:

LANG Yuchen — Harvard University, Department of the Classics
LI Chun — Beijing Foreign Studies University, Department of Latin
LI Shuo — Peking University, Department of History
TANG Yu — Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Département d'Histoire de l'art et archéologie
WANG Xizhi — Peking University, Department of History
XIE Sisi — University of Edinburgh, Department of Classics
YANG Jie — LMU München, Classical and Ancient Studies

Jump to a chapter

Brown ring = chapter has flagged translation deviations · amber fill = chapter has a headline gloss