This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the late 6th-century AD expansion and update of Arrian’s Euxine (Chapter 27 of this volume), probably by the same writer as the Hypotypōsis (Chapter 35). In the translation, the many passages deriving almost verbatim from Ps.-Skylax, the Nikomedean Periodos, Arrian, and Menippos are marked as such (following the practice of Diller). The introduction argues that the work merits closer attention than it has received, not least for what it tells us of population movements between the 2nd and 6th centuries. An appendix contains the late Anametresis of the Oikoumene or Perimetros of the Pontos. A new map, matching that for Arrian, includes place-names that had changed since Arrian’s time.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation (approximating English pentameters) of the anonymous iambic poem sometimes called (without any evidence) ‘Pseudo-Skymnos’ but here ‘the Nikomedean Periodos’ (127/6–74 BC). The surviving, first part of the poem, whose ‘journey’ is arranged clockwise from the western Mediterranean, takes us a little way into the Black Sea. For the next part, dealing with the Black Sea, we have 38 fragments, all but one of which are from the Pseudo-Arrianic Circumnavigation of the Black Sea (Chapter 36 of this volume). Of the remainder we have no trace. The chapter introduction revisits the controversy about the identity of the poem’s author: possibly Apollodoros of Athens, though that suggestion is less secure than has been thought (despite the claimed reading of Apollodoros’ name in a damaged passage of the manuscript); possibly the otherwise unknown Pausanias of Damascus (if he existed). The poem, dedicated to a king Nikomedes of Bithynia, displays the influence of Ephoros and Eratosthenes, as well as responding to Homer. Though innovative, the work had little influence (though the late antique Euxine, Chapter 36 below, repeatedly quotes from it) but remains an important source for scholars investigating Greek colonial foundations in the West. A new map indicates the ‘route’ followed in the poem.