Greek Authors and Works
The earliest technical geographic works drew on the orally transmitted experiences of merchant sailors and the increase in knowledge as a consequence of the Greek colonization movement in the archaic age. Periploi were composed, reports on voyages around certain coastal areas in the Aegean and Black Seas. Scylax of Caryanda is regarded as the founder of‘‘voyage’’ (periplous, lit., ‘‘a sailing around’’) literature (Peretti 1979; Salway 2004: 43-96). Works entitled Guide or Guide to the Earth (periegesis, lit., a ‘‘leading around’’ or periegesisges), equally old and closely related structurally, are literary descriptions of journeys around the world. The Ionian Hecataeus of Miletus is one of the earlier authors of this genre. (He also composed the Genealogies, which play an important role in the development of historiography.) These periplous and periegesis works already combine historical, ethnographic, and geographic interests, and the periplous, the earliest genre of geography, remained one of the most successful and long-lived in antiquity.
Ionia became the cradle of important genres and concepts in ancient geography and history. Hecataeus and Herodotus are well known for their early descriptions of the entire oikoumene. Among the Greeks Anaximander of Miletus created the first map of the world. Ionian philosophers developed different models of the cosmos and competing theories on the anchoring of the oikoumene in the world ocean. From the viewpoint of the historical development of the science, these were all amazing achievements in the early period of Greek geography. In contrast to its development in the ancient Orient or Egypt, for example, geography among the Greeks was not initially in the service of monarchical rulers, or of a certain theology or philosophy. The early great achievements of Greco-Roman geography were realized in the small autonomous poleis on the western coast of Asia Minor. They were, however, influenced by long-term contacts with Egypt and the Persian empire. Geography, philosophy, and cosmology shared close ties from early on. The oikoumenee was divided in the fourth century into five and later into seven climatic zones. The temperate zones, in which Greece and Rome lay, afforded the best conditions, according to ancient authors, for the development of advanced civilizations and the world power, Rome, because of their natural, climatic conditions. Apart from the Mediterranean oikoumenee with its three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, the existence of other oikoumenai and continents was theorized. Crates of Mallos, for example, postulated theoretically the existence of four regions of the world separated from one another by Ocean (Okeanos), and Seneca speculated about unknown continents in the western Atlantic.
Visual representations of the oikoumenee arose nearly simultaneously with the early periploi and perieegeeseis. Globes and maps were initially used in instruction at philosophic schools and in discussions among scholars, but the expensive, error-prone manual reproduction of elaborate maps or globes hindered their widespread dissemination. Illustrated maps and globes also remained rare due to their cost. An intensive debate is currently being conducted on the significance of a recently published papyrus fragment which contains part of Artemidorus of Ephesus’ geographical work and is illustrated with a simple map of Spain (Gallazzi and Kramer 1998: 189-208; Brodersen 2001b: 137-148). There is controversy as to what extent maps were used outside of learned circles in commerce and trade, administration and warfare later in the Hellenistic and Roman epochs. Recent investigations indicate that Greeks and Romans had a linear-hodological type and mode of perception and description or depiction of spaces that differed from that of, for example, modern Europeans or Americans (Janni 1984; Hanger 2001; Brodersen 2003a). The description of spaces of different sizes in geographic writings and digressions in historical works was typical for the epoch. Comparisons of the shape of certain countries with objects from daily life, e. g., Italy with a boot, or the Peloponnesus with the leaf of a plane tree, facilitated the memorization of the ancient literary equivalents of our modern maps. It remained difficult, however, to describe exactly spaces and coastlines purely by linguistic means. This procedure resulted in the typical distortions and mistakes (such as Herodotus’ description of Scythia or Strabo’s descriptions of the Gallic coastline or of Central Greece) that arose in descriptive geography (Dilke 1985; Geus 1999: 7-28; Prontera 2001: 187-229; Brodersen 2003a).
It is difficult to estimate how widespread the circulation of the world maps of Eratosthenes and Ptolemy was. It is doubtful whether there were illustrated cartographic editions of Strabo’s Geographica. Nevertheless he provides informative instructions for making a map of the world in light of his understanding of chorog-raphy (Str. Geog. 2.5.17, C120-121). Maps were occasionally reproduced in large-scale pictorial form on walls for educational purposes: in Athens, for example, in the Peripatos or in the school in Autun in late antiquity. Probably Eratosthenes’ map already fulfilled a propagandistic purpose according to the Ptolemies’ wishes. Certainly the map of Agrippa did so later during the Augustan principate (Nicolet 1988: 103-131; contra Podossinov 2000: 225-240).
Already in the course of the fourth century BCE a momentous tendency was perceptible leading to a differentiation of ancient geography. This bifurcation of ancient geography resulted in a mathematical-physical branch, which included astronomy also, and a branch of descriptive cultural geography. Astounding advances in knowledge were achieved by the mathematical branch, first in the works of Eudoxus (Lasserre 1966) and Dicaearchus (Keyser 2001: 353-372), and later in the Hellenistic period in the works of Eratosthenes (see below), Hipparchus (Hubner 2000b), and Aristarchus (Heath 1997). It reached its zenith with the works of Marinos and Claudius Ptolemy in the second century CE. The Ptolemaic world model (not the heliocentric one of Aristarchus), Ptolemy’s positional calculations and world and regional maps remained influential until the early modern era.
Large-scale invasions of conquest and radical epochal changes with novel world-empire formations elicited simultaneously substantial advances in knowledge in cultural geography, new images of the world, descriptions of the oikoumene, and cartographic depictions. First of all, Alexander the Great’s invasions of conquest and those of his immediate successors, the Diadochs, and later the wars of late republican and early Augustan Rome, led to new epochs in ancient geography. The early phase is representatively encapsulated in the works of Eratosthenes, while Strabo’s oikoumene geography represents the later phase. The Greco-Roman oikoumenee experienced substantial and lasting expansion after the Augustan and Tiberian epochs and thereafter no more (despite Trajan’s wars). Presumably cultural geography under the high and late empire thus lacked the stimulation to make substantial advances and replace the older geographic and historical body of knowledge of an Eratosthenes, Posidonius, or Strabo.
The description of the oikoumene world by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (Aujac 2001; Geus 2002; 2003: 232-245; 2004: 11-26), the most important geographer of the third century BCE in Alexandria, surpassed qualitatively all other work by far, and set the standard until the Augustan era. Eratosthenes’ world map, for which he developed a scientific system of degrees of longitude and latitude, and employed the most recent measurements and reports, long gave the scholarly world its primary picture of the oikoumenl. The extraordinarily precise measurement of the circumference of the earth and the division of the oikoumene into mathematical-geometric units, the sphragides, remain amazing accomplishments to this day. Because of the fragmentary transmission of his works, it is not easy to determine to what extent Eratosthenes already conceived of the science of geography as an independent discipline with a specific subject matter and its own methodology. Due to his high level of education, Eratosthenes was able to once again unite in his works the two disparate main branches of mathematical-physical and descriptive geography. Polybius was no longer able to do this, Posidonius did not want to, and Strabo’s criticism of Eratosthenes demonstrates that he could no longer quite follow the science of the sphragides. Marinos and Ptolemy devoted themselves completely to mathematical-astronomical geography. They therefore abandoned cultural geography, a more important field in antiquity in terms of its external impact, which enjoyed at the same time especially close connections with history.
Rome’s rise to uncontested world-power status and Roman rule over the Mediterranean oikoumenee found in Polybius, Posidonius, and Strabo three historians and geographers friendly to Rome, who treated this amazing (to their contemporaries) event with works of geography and universal history. While, however, Polybius (Walbank 1972; Clarke 1999a: 77-128; Engels 1999: 145-165) incorporated his most important geographical expositions as a digression in his Histories (Book 34), Posidonius and Strabo enhanced still further the value of geography as a part of their encyclopedic picture of the oikoumenee under Roman domination. This is because both placed, alongside their universal-historical accounts, comprehensive, formally original, geographical treatises that were connected intelligently to their own historical works.
Posidonius united geographical, historical-ethnographical, and philosophical interests in his History and On Ocean (Malitz 1983; Clarke 1999a: 129-192; Engels 1999: 166-201). Strabo criticized this latter treatise as being too mathematically and physically oriented. From his viewpoint, which was amicably disposed towards the principate, Strabo himself described the Mediterranean world with respect to its relationship with Rome, which he made the center of the oikoumene (Clarke 1999a: 193-336; Engels 1999; Dueck 2000). With all of his pride in the traditions of Asia Minor’s polis life and his own social status as a member of the educated eastern elite, Strabo nevertheless went further in his Romanophilic tendency than all earlier Greek geographers. He strongly emphasized the political and administrative utility of geography and understood descriptive geography to be a part of philosophy. Mathematical-physical geography remained also for Strabo a basis for cultural geography, but no longer supplied its technical core. Strabo moved geography still closer to history than Polybius and Posidonius had done, but he certainly also contributed (involuntarily) to its stagnation, which shortly thereafter spread.
More recent works in Greco-Roman descriptive cultural geography generally failed to gain acceptance. Older descriptions and geographic scholarly opinions were still cited centuries later out of admiration for the educational value of canonical works, even when new discoveries and scientific advances should have necessitated the correction or silent omission of antiquated opinions. In Strabo and many of his colleagues one encounters a conspicuous reverence for the geographic references contained in the Homeric epics (the ‘‘Catalogue of Ships’’ in the Iliad, the description of Achilles’ shield, the voyages of Odysseus) which the adherents of Eratosthenes reproached as completely obsolete or even regarded as mere poetic inventions (Geus 2002: 264-267). These same critics also downplayed Homer as the archegetes of geography (Biraschi 1984: 127-153; Engels 1999: 115-120). Although geographic authors often claimed to write a relevant account at a critical time with great usefulness for their contemporaries, the main focus of the works tended to fall not so much on conveying the most up-to-date knowledge as on citations derived from literary sources circulated in educated circles and scholarly discussions on the perennial problems in the field. The development of the genre of descriptive geography as a science was - differently than in modern times - also impeded by the fact that valuable reports of journeys and voyages by merchants and discoverers (people not in possession of a philosophic education and high social prestige) were wrongly disregarded by learned geographers. The most pregnant example of such arrogance based on education is Strabo’s rejection (1.4.3, C63) of Pytheas of Massilia’s account of his voyage in northern Europe (Bianchetti 2002: 439-485; Cunliffe 2002; Magnani 2002).
Despite their intellectual acuity, the best works of mathematical-physical geography suffered from the lack of sufficient, reliably ascertained data. When Ptolemy wanted to project all important places on a new map, he had to combine reliable astronomical observations with information derived from unreliable literary accounts or even mere estimations. Mathematical-physical geography was unable to make any further decisive advances in antiquity due to a lack of adequately well-developed technical instruments of observation and reliable hard data (above all regarding the degrees of longitude). This type of geography increasingly declined in step with the general decrease of mathematical-astronomical knowledge in late antiquity. The stagnation in the development of this branch of geography was first surmounted by Arabic geographers and astronomers, and decisive advances were made in the beginning of the modern era, with the help of new instruments of observation and measurement.
Geography and History among the Romans
There are clearly fewer original geographical works known to us in Latin literature than in Greek literature. Ancient geography remained in its two main branches primarily a discipline shaped by Greek authors. The works of Posidonius and Strabo represent the zenith of Greco-Roman cultural geography in terms of the amount and quality of the information. In the case of Latin authors, even the most valuable works - the contributions of Varro, the description of the world by Pomponius Mela, or the geographical references in Pliny’s encyclopedia - clearly cannot match the works of Strabo and Posidonius. Ancient experts, such as the geographer Strabo, speak skeptically or condescendingly about the quality of Latin geographical writings (Str. Geog. 3.4.19, C166). The Romans preferred to integrate geographic and ethnographic information as digressions into their historical works or into encyclopedic writings (Pedech 1980: 23-35; Winkler 2000: 141-161). Nevertheless, typical geographical traditions also developed in the Latin language, e. g., in commentarii (C. Julius Caesar, M. Vipsanius Agrippa) and in the itineraries of late antiquity. One finds an amazing amount of cleverly selected information in the Res Gestae of Augustus and other Roman monuments bearing inscriptions. We can also perceive an original Roman tradition involving the recording, measuring, and description of spaces (Nicolet 1988; Campbell 2000; Lewis 2001) in the writings of the surveyors (agrimensores), ancient land register plans (e. g., from Orange), and city plans (i. e., of the capital Rome).
The influence of Varro’s geographical works (Sallmann 1971) on later Latin geographers, especially on Pliny, is difficult to determine because of the situation surrounding the transmission of Varro’s works. It should not be deemed insignificant, however. The rich geographical information contained in Books 2-6 of the Elder Pliny’s Natural History (Healy 2000; Naas 2002; Murphy 2004) cannot hide the fact that we are no longer dealing here with an original piece of geographic writing. The integration of geographic information in a comprehensive encyclopedia is rather an indication of the reduction in quality and quantity of what this educated senator considered worthwhile geographic information.
In the Greek language also, cultural and mathematical-physical geography in the imperial period experienced scientific stagnation and until late antiquity even took a qualitative step backwards. A good example of these tendencies is provided by one of the best known works of ancient cultural-geographical literature, Pausanias’ Guide (Periegesis) to Greece (Habicht 1985; Arafat 1996; Alcock et al. 2001), which can be understood both as a historical-antiquarian and a geographic work. The most detailed surviving description of the world in Latin literature is the Chorographia of Pompo-nius Mela (Brodersen 1994; Romer 1998), but if one compares it with Strabo’s Geographica, it likewise displays only too clearly, in its scope and quality, the decline of oikoumene geography.
Itinerary works of late antiquity ( itineraria adnotata, itineraria picta, and itiner-aria maritima) draw the logical consequence from the specific Roman-Latin tradition of geography in antiquity (Brodersen 2001a: 7-21; 2003b: 289-297; 2004: 183-190; Salway 2001: 22-66; Prontera 2003; Talbert 2004: 113-141). One could characterize them as the geographical equivalent in late antiquity of the tradition of the breviaria and epitomes in historiography. Although most itineraries limit themselves to an extremely unadorned and brief description of routes, nevertheless the Tabula Peutingeriana at least contains a great wealth of geographical information. Analysis of the ‘‘hodological’’ description of routes in itineraries by land (e. g., Itinerarium Antonini) and by sea (Periplus maris interni by Menippus of Pergamum, Stadiasmus maris magni) informs us how space was conceived in the Roman imperial period.
In the late Roman empire and in Byzantium (Belke 2000) geography sank to the status of an ancillary discipline of theology, philology, and history. The scope of this chapter, however, does not allow an assessment of the changes in the relationship between the Christian interpretation of history stressing God’s (saving) grace and geography. Early Christian itineraries (Itinerarium Burdigalense, Itinerarium
Egeriae) do not yet differ structurally as later Christian geographical writings do from their pagan antecedents (Hunt 1982; 2004: 97-110; Elsner2000: 181-195). On the other hand, this is definitely true for the world view of the first Mappae mundi, the early medieval Christian maps of the world (Englisch 2002), in contrast to pagan oikoumene maps.
FURTHER READING
The most sensible way to approach the subject in depth is to read the ancient geographical works themselves, preferably in the Greek or Latin original language. The following translations serve as good introductions: on Posidonius, Kidd 1988-1999 (English); on Strabo, Jones 1917-1932 (English) or, better, Radt 2002-2005 (German); on Pausanias, Jones 1917-1932 (English) or, better, Meyer 1986-1989 (German); on Ptolemy, Stiickelberger et al. 2005- (German); on Pomponius Mela, Romer 1998 (English) or Brodersen 1994 (German); on Pliny’s Natural History Books 2-4, Rackham and Jones 1938-1963 (English) or Konig et al. 1974-1996 (German).
Of the general introductions Bunbury 1879 remains worth reading, due to its detailed treatment; for more recent works see van Paassen 1957; Jacob 1991; and Cordano 1992.
World History
