Maës Titianus was an ancient Roman traveller of Macedonian culture. He was a Greek speaker who came from a family of merchants who had both Syrian and Roman identity. Maës sent an expedition that is recorded as having travelled farthest along the Silk Road from the Mediterranean world. In the early 2nd century CE or at the end of the 1st century BC, during a lull in the intermittent Roman struggles with Parthia, his party reached the famous Stone Tower, somewhere in or around the Pamir Mountains close to the border with China. Nothing is known of him, apart from a brief credit in Ptolemy's Geography, 1.11.7, whose knowledge of Maës was gained through an intermediary source, Marinus of Tyre: When Maes' expedition reached the Pamirs, the Chinese general Ban Chao of the Han Empire intercepted the group and ensured they were taken eastward to the Chinese capital Luoyang. They were brought before the Han Emperor He. The travellers spoke Greek and were with Parthian merchants and so did not identify themselves as Roman. Thus, the Chinese did not realise they were dealing with subjects of Da Qin (the Roman Empire). Chinese records written in the Hou Hanshu state that the encounter took place in AD 100. As was standard protocol the Maes merchants offered tribute to Emperor He by giving rewoven Syrian silks and imperial gold coins that bore the image of Emperor Trajan. They were given Han silks as diplomatic gifts and then sent back on their long way back to Syria. It would take them 12 months to return home, totalling two years for the whole round-trip. When they returned, knowledge of their experience spread around the Roman world and for the first time Romans in Egypt and Syria knew of a superpower in the Far East that produced large quantities of silk and steel. Maes Titianus wrote a full account of the journey taken by his merchants but only a brief summary of his work survives in the writings of Claudius Ptolemy. However, a brief article by Max Cary teased apart some probabilities, notably that the purpose of the expedition was to organize the import of Chinese silk by controlling or eliminating some of the middlemen through whom trade goods were passed, among whom the least dependable were the Parthians. The Stone Tower was located in Xinjiang, the westernmost province over which the Chinese periodically attempted