The Elder Pliny's African Geography*

Abstract

Two decades have passed since the publication of Leo Teutsch’s classic study of the towns and cities of North Africa under the Roman Republic. 1 His systematic and probing re-examination of orthodox interpretations of the status and history of African municipalities in their infancy, based on a critical rereading of the sources, marks a watershed in our understanding of Republican Africa. By carefully separating the facts from a tangle of modern hypotheses, Teutsch demolished ideas that had become hallowed by long acceptance. 2 No mere iconoclast, however, he established a basis for renewed inquiry into the early history of African municipal development and refocussed attention on the main problem confronting any new interpretation, namely, the question of the sources themselves. In particular he drew attention to the uncertainty surrounding our principal source, the Elder Pliny’s geography of Africa ((Historia naturalis , V. 1–30). He proffered a solution that clarified the main difficulties, but no consensus emerged in his favour. His death in an air crash in Turkey in 1962 not only robbed Roman history of an exacting and original scholar, but also cut short any possible risposte Teutsch could have made to his critics.

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