Were the Roman's as early as the late Republic not only aware of but knowledgeable on the arctic circle and the North Pole?

by SimpleJacksFlapJacks

I was looking to do some reading by Cato the Elder and came across and interesting book or treatises written by himself and another by Varro on Roman farming. While I was reading through the treatises I came across a very interesting and perplexing passage about the Arctic and North Pole. Varro Is discussing farming in various regions and mentions the north pole and the arctic where even the sea freezes over. And that the arctic doesn't receive sunlight for 6 months out of the year. This really and I mean really Struck me as odd as the North Pole wasn't technically "discovered" until 1908. I'm sure people were aware of it far before that, but that far back in the late republic with that much detail? My instincts are either that it was the translater adding modern context to what and assuming what Varro was speaking on or whether the Roman's were this knowledgeable on the arctic region. I have provided a link to the text it is in Varro's Rerum Resticarum Book 1 section A paragraph 4. https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12140/pg12140.html PLEASE HELP ME MY MIND CANT HHANDLE THIS

y_sengaku

Since Ancient Greeks like Aristotle (actually Parmenides), scholars had already envisioned the earth as a globe with several climate zones primarily divided by the latitude, and the frigid zone is located in the highest latitude (Sanderson 1999: 699).

Medieval Arab authors would also inherit this concept from the Classical geographic treatises, and call the arctic region (beyond the arctic circle) like now north-western Russia/Eurasia as "The land of darkness", that is to say, the land with longer night in winter and longer daylight in summer.

To what extant this kind of knowledge was founded on the actual experience/ observation by travelers from the Mediterranean is another matter, however, mainly due to the transmission of the source. To give an example, Pytheas of Marseilles (4th century BCE) was probably the most famous explorer, but as I explained and cited an excerpt before in: How did the Greek explorer Pytheas describe the Norse people in the 4th century BC?, his work itself has been lost, and our knowledge of his description is mainly based on the citation in later authors like Strabo and Pliny the Elder.

Add. Reference:

  • Sanderson, Marie. “The Classification of Climates from Pythagoras to Koeppen.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 80, no. 4 (1999): 669–73. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26214921.

(Edited): fixes typo (plural/ singular).