Geographica

• 1. Introduction

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  Strabo's Geographica is a 17-book encyclopedia of the known world, written in Greek sometime between the late first century BC and the early first century AD. It is one of the longest works of ancient geography to survive. At its heart, it asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to describe the earth? Strabo himself gave his work at least five different names. He called it geographia, a description of the earth. He called it chōrographia, a description of the land. He called it periodos gēs, a circuit of the earth. The multiplicity of titles hints at something about this project. It was not one thing. It was a colossal attempt to hold the entire inhabited world inside a single text. How did a Greek-speaking citizen of the Roman Empire come to write it? What did he actually put inside those 17 books? And how did his words survive more than two thousand years to reach us?

• 2. A Life Spent Gathering Notes

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  Strabo visited Rome in 44 BC when he was 19 or 20 years old, apparently for purposes of education. Among his teachers was Tyrannion, a captive educated Greek who also instructed Cicero's two sons. Cicero himself mentioned the ambition of geographical writing in his own letters, noting the scale such a work would demand. Strabo worked on the Geographica alongside his earlier History for most of his adult life, traveling extensively and gathering notes along the way. He made an extended visit to Alexandria between 25 and 20 BC, when he was 44 years old. The famous library there almost certainly provided the raw material for what he called his "numerous excerpts" from "the works of his predecessors." He also described traveling personally from Armenia to Tyrrhenia and from the Euxine Sea to the frontiers of Ethiopia. He went up the Nile with his friend Aelius Gallus, the prefect of Egypt, as far as the edge of Ethiopia and Syene. The scale of that firsthand experience is remarkable. It was paired, though, with a clear acknowledgment: he and all other geographers receive most of their information by hearsay.

• 3. Dating a Work Without a Date

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  Strabo did not date his work, and determining when it was written has been a matter of scholarly study since the Renaissance. The earliest attempts appeared in the 16th and 17th centuries, including the 1549 Basel edition and the 1571 Heidelberg edition. The first serious scholarly attempt was by Johannes Fabricus in 1717. Scholars have worked instead from internal clues scattered through the text. Most events from the life of Augustus that Strabo mentions occurred between 31 and 7 BC, with a gap between 6 BC and 14 AD. That gap has been read as evidence for a first publication around 7 BC. A more precise anchor appears in a passage about the Carni and Norici, where Strabo says they had been at peace since Drusus stopped their raids 33 years earlier. Since that event was 15 BC, the passage dates to the summer of 19 AD. The latest event mentioned in the entire work is the death of Juba, which occurred no later than 23 AD. By that point, Strabo was in his 80s. The scholar Dueck concludes from this evidence that the Geography was written between 18 and 24 AD.

• 4. Two Kinds of Geography

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  Strabo was explicit about what he thought geography meant. He argued that it is the sea more than anything else that defines the contours of land, by forming gulfs, deep seas, straits, isthmuses, peninsulas, and promontories. Rivers and mountains assist, but the sea comes first. From that description it becomes clear that he understood geography and chorography as two distinct but related things. Geography, in his usage, meant what we would call physical geography. Chorography meant political geography, the arrangement of nations, cities, and peoples across the landscape. The Geographica combined both. Book I treats geography as a branch of philosophy and names Homer as the founder of the discipline. The work insists that geography requires encyclopedic knowledge spanning celestial, terrestrial, and maritime features as well as natural history and mathematics. Strabo recommended representing the Earth on a globe no less than 10 feet in diameter, or on a plane map of at least 7 feet. The inhabited world, in his view, was an island shaped like a truncated cone, roughly 70,000 stadia long and 30,000 stadia wide. He did not believe Pytheas that Thule was as far north as the Arctic Circle, and he thought no one lived north of Ierne.

• 5. The World in 17 Books

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  Book III opens on Iberia, which Strabo described as poor, inhospitable, and mountainous, approximately 6,000 stadia north to south and 5,000 stadia east to west. He noted that the fertile southeastern region called Baetica, around the Baetis river, was occupied by the Tourdētanoi, who had writing and a literature. Other Iberians had alphabets but used different languages. Baetica exported wheat, wine, and oil, and its subsoil was full of gold, silver, copper, and iron. The tuna of the Baetis littoral, he wrote, ate so many acorns they resembled sea pigs. Gaul appears in Book IV, covering the Belgae, including a description of their three intellectual classes: the bards, the vates, and the druids. He also recorded a strange island near the mouth of the Loire, inhabited entirely by women and devoted to a Dionysiac cult. Accounts of Britain and Ireland follow, alongside the Alps and the Rhine. Books V through X cover Italy, Sicily, and Greece in detail. Books XI through XVI move east through the Caucasus, Anatolia, Central Asia, Parthia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East. Book XVII closes the work with North Africa, ending at Egypt. Strabo's description of Alexandria includes the Pharos lighthouse, the Royal palace, the Caesarium, and the moment when Augustus defeated Mark Antony.

• 6. Manuscripts and Survival

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  About 30 manuscripts of the Geographica or portions of it have survived, almost all of them medieval copies. The earliest is a fragmentary palimpsest from the fifth century, now split across three manuscripts and identified as Vaticanus gr. 2306 and 2061 A. It is a rare bi-rescriptus, meaning it was erased and written over twice. Originally it had 44 square leaves, comparable in scale to the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. It was possibly written in Caesarea and held in the Law school of Berytus. The text was erased in the 8th century and overwritten with the Nomocanon, then erased again and overwritten with the Pentateuch and writings of Gregory of Nazianzus in Southern Italy in the 10th century. The manuscript now identified as Parisinus gr. 1397, dating to the tenth century, provides the best surviving text for Books 1-9, though it was badly eaten by mice in Books 8 and 9, leaving gaps. The manuscript known as Parisinus gr. 1393, from the thirteenth century, contains the entire text. The end of Book 7 was lost sometime in the later Byzantine period. Manuscripts of Books 1-9 date to the tenth century; the earliest manuscript containing the entire work dates to the thirteenth century.

• 7. From Pope to Columbus

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  A Latin translation commissioned by Pope Nicholas V appeared around 1469, with another following in 1472. These translations were probably used by Columbus and other early Renaissance explorers. The first printed Greek edition was the Aldine of 1516. Isaac Casaubon produced the first text with scholarly commentary in Geneva in 1587. The Teubner edition appeared in 1852-53 under August Meineke. The first semi-critical Greek text was established by Kramer, Meineke, Müller, and Dübner during the 1840s-50s. That work predated the discovery and study of the fifth-century palimpsest by Cardinal Angelo Mai, Giuseppe Cozza Luzi, and Pierre Batiffol in 1844, 1875, and 1888 respectively. The first fully critical edition of the Geographica was only completed in 2011 by Stefan Radt, in a ten-volume German edition published by Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht in Göttingen. The English translation of the full work required two translators: Sterrett translated Books I and II and wrote the introduction before dying in 1915, at which point Jones changed Sterrett's style from free to more literal and finished the remaining books.