Strabo

• 1. Introduction

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  Strabo, writing sometime around the reign of Emperor Tiberius, left behind a work so encyclopaedic that it described the known world from Britain and Ireland all the way to Central Asia and North Africa. Yet for centuries after his death around 24 AD, almost nobody read it. He was born into a well-connected family in Amaseia in Pontus, around 64 BC, and would go on to travel as far west as the coast of Tuscany, as far south as Ethiopia, and deep into Egypt along the Nile. The questions his life raises are not small ones. How does a man from a family that switched sides during a brutal war between Rome and Pontus end up writing the only surviving ancient account of the Greek and Roman world under Augustus? What drove him to prefer the human texture of places over the cold mathematics of latitude? And how did a geographer dead for two thousand years anticipate ideas that modern geologists would only catch up with much later?

• 2. A Family Between Empires

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  Amaseia in Pontus shaped Strabo long before he ever opened a book. His family had been involved in politics at least since the reign of Mithridates V, and several relatives, including his paternal grandfather, served Mithridates VI during the Mithridatic Wars. When those wars wound down, his grandfather made a fateful choice: he handed several Pontic fortresses over to the Romans. Strabo recorded that "great promises were made in exchange for these services." Persian culture persisted in Amaseia even after Mithridates and Tigranes were defeated, and scholars have wondered what that betrayal cost the family among their neighbours, and whether Roman citizenship might have been their reward. On his mother's side, Strabo was related to Dorylaeus, extending the family's web of connections further still. The young Strabo grew up at the seam of two civilisations, and that position would leave its mark on everything he later wrote about the relationship between Greek culture and Roman power.

• 3. The Teachers Who Made Him

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  Strabo's first serious teacher was Aristodemus, whom he met in Nysa, the city now known as Sultanhisar in Turkey. Aristodemus was the grandson of the famous Posidonius, and his influence runs throughout Strabo's Geography. He had previously taught the sons of the Roman general who took over Pontus, a detail that captures the era's habit of Greek intellectuals instructing Roman elites. Aristodemus ran two schools simultaneously, one in Nysa and one in Rhodes, and the Nysa school carried a particular obsession with Homeric literature and the interpretation of ancient Greek epics. Strabo became a devoted admirer of Homer's poetry, possibly rooted in those years under Aristodemus. Around 44 BC, at roughly the age of twenty-one, he moved to Rome and stayed at least until 31 BC. There he studied philosophy under the Peripatetic Xenarchus, a highly respected figure in Augustus's court, then grammar under Tyrannion of Amisus, a wealthy scholar who had befriended Cicero and taught Cicero's nephew Quintus. Tyrannion was also, crucially, a respected authority on geography. The final significant mentor was Athenodorus Cananites, a Stoic philosopher who had spent his life in Rome since 44 BC building relationships with the Roman elite. Athenodorus was also the tutor of Augustus himself. From Athenodorus, Strabo absorbed Stoic philosophy and received first-hand knowledge of parts of the empire he would never personally visit.

• 4. A Life Spent Moving

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  In 29 BC, travelling toward Corinth where Augustus was staying at the time, Strabo stopped at the island of Gyaros in the Aegean Sea. Around 25 BC, he sailed up the Nile as far as Philae. He ranged as far west as coastal Tuscany and, by his own account, as far south as the borders of Ethiopia. Travel across the Mediterranean and Near East was fashionable and logistically feasible during this period, helped along by the relative peace of the reign of Augustus, which lasted from 27 BC to AD 14. Strabo spent considerable time in the famous library at Alexandria, working through the notes of his predecessors. He was candid about the reach of his own travels, writing: "Westward I have journeyed to the parts of Etruria opposite Sardinia; towards the south from the Euxine to the borders of Ethiopia; and perhaps not one of those who have written geographies has visited more places than I have between those limits." After Philae, the record of his movements goes quiet until AD 17, leaving a gap of roughly four decades that historians have never been able to fill.

• 5. The Geography Itself

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  A first edition of the Geographica appeared around 7 BC, and a final edition no later than 23 AD, possibly the last year of Strabo's life. The work's latest datable reference is a mention of the death of Juba II, king of Maurousia, described as having died "just recently," which places that passage in or around AD 23. Strabo chose a descriptive approach to geography deliberately, distancing himself from the astronomical methods of Eratosthenes and Hipparchus. He argued that statesmen were more concerned with the human character of countries than with numerical measurements. The result is the only surviving ancient text offering a combined account of Greek and Roman peoples and places under Augustus. It covers Britain and Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula, Gaul, Germania, the Alps, Italy, Greece, the Northern Black Sea region, Anatolia, the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. Alexandria appears in detail in the final book, described as a thriving port with beautiful public parks and streets wide enough for chariots and horsemen, where Strabo quoted the city's grid: "Two of these are exceeding broad, over a plethron in breadth, and cut one another at right angles." Lawrence Kim has noted that Strabo is "pro-Roman throughout the Geography," though he simultaneously works to establish Greek primacy in cultural and intellectual matters. In Europe, Strabo was the first writer to identify the Danube and the Istros as the same river, with the name change occurring at the cataracts now called the Iron Gates on the Romanian-Serbian border. After his death, the Geographica was rarely consulted by contemporary writers, and it first reached Western Europe as a Latin translation issued around 1469. The first printed edition appeared in Venice in 1516, and the scholar Isaac Casaubon produced the first critical edition in 1587.

• 6. Geology Before Its Time

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  Charles Lyell, in his Principles of Geology, quoted Strabo at length and noted that his geological thinking was only beginning to be appreciated by modern scientists. Strabo engaged seriously with the question of why marine shells appeared buried at great elevations far from the sea. He considered and rejected the ideas of Xanthus the Lydian, who attributed the phenomenon to seas that had once been more extensive, and Strato the natural philosopher, who argued that river sediment was gradually raising the bed of the Black Sea until it burst through near Byzantium toward the Sea of Marmara. Strabo found both theories insufficient. His own proposal held that the ground itself rises and subsides, carrying the sea with it: "the same land is sometimes raised up and sometimes depressed, and the sea also is simultaneously raised and depressed so that it either overflows or returns into its own place again." He grounded this in observable events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and sudden swellings of the seabed. He named specific cities, including Bure and Bizona, that had been swallowed by earthquakes as evidence that both small and large tracts of land could subside. He also noted that the land near Sicily was rarely shaken in his time, because volcanic vents at Etna, the Lipari Islands, and Ischia provided release for underground fire and pressure, anticipating the idea that volcanoes act as safety valves for subterranean forces.

• 7. Volcanism and Fossils

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  At Katakekaumene, the burned land in what is now Kula in western Turkey, Strabo observed a landscape of ash-covered, black soil and hills formed by hot masses expelled from the ground. He counted three pits called Physas, separated from one another by forty stadia, and reasoned from the evidence around him that a subsurface fire had once burned there and since gone out. He noted that the same ash-laden soil produced wines that compared favourably to any of the famous wines of the ancient world, drawing a parallel to the soil around Katana in Sicily. His observations at Katakekaumene predate the account by Pliny the Younger of the eruption of Vesuvius on the 24th of August AD 79, making Strabo one of the earliest writers to describe volcanic landscapes in systematic terms. He also turned his attention to the small lentil-shaped stones found near the Egyptian pyramids, which some people in his time claimed were the petrified food of the workers who built them. Strabo rejected that explanation, comparing the stones to similar pebbles he had seen near Amaseia, his hometown, and to the rounded stones formed by rivers. He did not arrive at a complete answer, but his instinct to seek natural rather than legendary explanations put him ahead of many of his contemporaries. Near those same pyramids, he placed the village of Troy beside a mountain called the Trojan mountain, recording a local tradition that it had been settled by captive Trojans who had accompanied Menelaus.