Basilis (writer)
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Basilis (Ancient Greek: Βάσιλις) was a writer (or possibly multiple writers) of ancient Greece. Several ancient authors describe a writer named "Basilis" who wrote on geographical subjects, and it is generally assumed these are all the same person.[1][2] There is not unanimous consensus about his date, but several scholars say he probably lived in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE.[3]
Pliny the Elder wrote that in the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (that is, the 3rd century BCE), a Basilis traveled the Upper Nile river. According to Pliny, he also seems to have written on Aethiopia, as he gave an account of the size of the country.[4] The 2nd-century grammarian Athenaeus quotes the second book of a work on India (Ἰνδικά) by a "Basilis".[5] A "Basilis" is also mentioned by the 2nd-century BCE geographer Agatharchides among the writers on the east.[6]
We also possess some fragments of his, in which he describes Pygmy peoples in wildly mythological terms, as being small enough to ride on the back of a partridge.[7][8]
The 19th century Arabist and archaeologist Eduard Glaser identified Basilis as the author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, but other scholars, such as Wilfred Harvey Schoff, disagreed strongly.[9][10]
