ABSTRACT
Initial Roman interest south of the Pillars of Herakles was largely a result of the defeat of Carthage and did not continue, although the reconnaissance of the Canary Islands by Juba II, sometime between 25 and 2bc, is an exception. 1 Yet this was as much due to Juba’s scholarly heritage as to Roman policy, and with the publication of his Libyka during the last decade of the first century bc, and his On Arabia a few years later, it was believed that all that could be said about the southern half of the world had been published. To be sure, the author of the Periplous of the Erythraian Sea would write in the middle of the first century AC that the southern part of Africa, the part that eventually joins the Western Ocean, was unexplored, 2 but this seemed of no concern, and the coast from Zanzibar to Cameroon was never examined in antiquity, 3 considered too far outside any area of interest for either Greeks or Romans. Roman exploration of Africa was in the interior. 4
