SCYLAX OF CARYANDA (in

Caria)  , Greek historian, lived in the time of Darius Hystaspis (521–485 B.c.), who commissioned him to explore the course of the Indus . He started from Caspatyrus (Caspapyrus in Hecataeus; the site cannot be identified: see V . A . Smith, Early Hist. of India, 2nd ed., 1908, 34 note), and is said by Herodotus (iv . 44) to have reached the sea. whence he sailed west through the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea . Scylax wrote an account of his explorations, referred to by Aristotle (Politics, vii . 14), and probably also a history of the Cariaa hero Heracleides,' prince of Mylasae, who distinguished himself in the revolt against Darius (Herodotus v . 121) . This work is the earliest known Greek history which centred round the achievements of a single individual . Suldas (s.v.), who mentions the second work, confounds the older Scylax with a much later author, who wrote a refutation of the history of Polybius, and is presumably identical with Scylax of Halicarnassus, a statesman and astrologer, the friend of Panaetius spoken of by Cicero (De div. ii . 42) . Neither of these, however, can be the author of the Periplus of the Mediterranean, which has come down to us under the name of Scylax of Caryanda .

This work is little more than a sailor's handbook of places and distances all round the

coast of the Mediterranean and its branches, and then along the outer Libyan coast as far as the Carthaginians traded . Internal evidence shows that it must have been written long after the time of Herodotus, about 350 B.C . Editions by B . Fabricius (1878) and C . Muller in Geographici Graeci minores, i., where the subject is fully discussed; see also G . F . Unger, Philologus, xxxiii . (1874); B . G . Niebuhr, Kleine Schriften, i . (1828); and E . H .