Strabo

Geographer and historian

Born: 64 or 63 b. c.e.; Amasia, Pontus, Asia Minor (now Amasya, Turkey) Died: After 23 c. e.; probably Amasia, Pontus, Asia Minor or Rome (now in Italy)

Category: Geography; historiography

Life Born to wealthy parents, Strabo (STRAY-boh) studied grammar, geography, and philosophy. For six years, he lived in Egypt and worked in the great library of Alexandria and traveled the Nile as far as Ethiopia. He also lived in Rome for six years but seems not to have traveled much

Strabo.

(Library of Congress)

Beyond major roadways. He visited Crete and Corinth for short periods of time. His travel in Greece was very limited. At the time of his death, he was probably in Amasia or Rome. Almost nothing of his personal life is known.

Strabo wrote two major works, one of which survives. The lost work was a forty-seven-book history of Rome that he hoped would supplement Polybius’s The Histories (n. d.; translation, 1889). His extant work is Geographica (c. 7 b. c.e.; Geography, 1917-1933) in seventeen books. Books 1 and 2 are among the most important, being a critique of past works on the subject, almost all of which no longer exist. Indeed, much of what is known of Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Posidonius, and Eudoxus of Cnidus is found in Strabo’s Geography. The remainder of the work presents his conceptions of Spain, Sicily, Italy, Greece, Egypt, India, and Persia as well as the Middle East. As he did not visit many of these places, he relied heavily on previous sources for his information. Occasionally, he failed to employ the most up-to-date sources available, for example, Julius Caesar’s Co-mentarii de bello Gallico (52-51 b. c.e.; translated with Comentarii de bello civili, 45 b. c.e., as Commentaries, 1609), and he gave more credence to myth when dealing with Greece than was common by this time.

In part because his training in mathematics was limited, Strabo’s geography was more cultural than physical, and he tended to undervalue the more scientific approach. He suggested (from Eratosthenes) that the inhabited world (oikoumene) was a single landmass surrounded by oceans and included Europe, Asia, and Africa with their associated islands. He hoped that his work would be read by the rulers of Rome so that they would understand the geography of the areas over which they ruled.

Influence Strabo’s work on geography provides a compendium of much of the knowledge of that subject in the first century of the common era. His commentaries and quotations from earlier writers are invaluable. Finally, his own style, never dull, provides insights into the thinking of educated Greco-Romans early in the Roman Empire.

Further Reading

Dueck, Daniela. Strabo of Amasia: A Greek Man of Letters in Augustan Rome. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Dueck, Daniela, Hugh Lindsay, and Sarah Pothecary, eds. Strabo’s Cul-

Tural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Koelsch, William A. “Squinting Back at Strabo.” Geographical Review 94, no. 4 (October, 2005): 502-518.

Strabo. The Geography of Strabo. Translated by Horace Leonard Jones.

Reprint. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Tozer, H. F. A History of Ancient Geography. New York: Biblio and Tannen, 1964.

Terry R. Morris

See also: Alexandrian Library; Eratosthenes of Cyrene; Historiography; Literature; Polybius.