Strabo of Amasia (c. (c. 64 BCE - c. 24 CE) was the author of Geography, a 17-book geography of the world as it was known to the Greeks and Romans of the time, extending from Iberia and Mauria (Mauretania) in the west to India as recorded by Alexander the Great’s companions, and from Ethiopia to ‘Farthest Thule’, an unidentified island north of Britain. Strabo lived during the 1st centuries BCE and CE, and thus would have been an outside observer on some momentous political upheavals, including Rome’s civil wars and the establishment of Augustus as emperor.
Early Life
Strabo's home city, Amasia (Amasya, modern Turkey), was the former capital of the Pontus region. Strabo records the intimate involvement of his ancestors with the royal family of Pontus, including their friendship with the kings Mithridates Euergetes V and Mithridates Eupator VI. These ancestors, however, made a number of attempts to betray Mithridates in favour of the invading Romans. Although they ultimately fell out of favour with both Pontic and Roman leaders, the Roman cognomen of ‘Strabo’ may suggest adoption into a Roman familia or the bestowal of Roman citizenship at some stage, either for Strabo himself or a member of his family.
Strabo's Roman name and aristocratic Greek heritage reflects his position between two worlds: one Hellenistic and dominated by Greek-speaking monarchies, and the other conditioned by the Roman empire as an increasingly unmatched force in the Mediterranean and beyond. These circumstances also inform his Geography, in which the author comes across both as a proud inheritor of the Greek literary tradition, but willing as well to position Italy as the new cultural and geographical centre of a shaken-up world.
Strabo travelled far from Amasia in the course of his life. He received his education from various Peripatetic philosophers in locations such as Nysa, although he ultimately chose to follow Stoic philosophy, referring to Stoicism as ‘our school’ and its founder as ‘our Zeno’. It can be inferred from his work that he spent time during his adulthood in both Rome and Alexandria, including travelling up the Nile in the entourage of Aelius Gallus, the prefect of Egypt who later mounted an expedition across the Red Sea against Arabia Felix, which failed dramatically in its aims to explore the region and to make allies or subjects of its inhabitants. Strabo mentions the extent of his own travels:
I have travelled westward from Armenia as far as the regions of Tyrrhenia opposite Sardinia, and southward from the Euxine Sea as far as the frontiers of Ethiopia. And you could not find another person among the writers on geography who has travelled over much more of the distances just mentioned than I…
(Geography, 2.5.11)
The Mediterranean World
Strabo thus had personal knowledge of many of the locations which he describes. For others, such as Iberia and India, he is reliant on the reports of others. Strabo records hundreds of sources which he used to compile his Geography, ranging from Homeric epic to Eratosthenes, the Hellenistic geographer and head librarian at Alexandria. His Homeric interests are evident both from his tendency to regard geographical information contained in Homer as infallible, and from his use of commentators on Homeric geography, such as Apollodorus of Athens, who discussed the geographical implications of the Iliadic ‘Catalogue of Ships’, and Hestiaia of Alexandria, a female scholar who wrote on the topography of Homer's Iliad. Strabo’s Geography preserves numerous quotations and paraphrases of such authors, although it can be sometimes difficult to disentangle Strabo’s own views and contributions from those reported.
The Geography traces a clockwise path around the Mediterranean, beginning and ending at the Pillars of Hercules (the Straits of Gibraltar). This is in the style of the written sailing guides of the time, which were known as Periploi. Strabo was generally interested in the 'inhabited world' (or oikoumenē) as he perceived it, rather than the layout of the entire globe, regarding this as too abstract a concern for a work which he intended as practical and useful to political and military leaders:
The greater part of geography serves political needs: for the setting of the activities of states is the land and the sea, which we inhabit... Moreover, the greatest generals are men who are able to control land and sea, and to unite nations and cities under one government and political administration. It is therefore plain that geography as a whole has a direct bearing upon the activities of commanders.
(1.1.16)
The genre of the chorography (a written description of a particular place or region) is also relevant to Strabo’s undertaking: his work can be seen as a sequence of chorographies which encompass the known world.
Geometry, Astronomy, and Natural Sciences
Strabo saw geography as a composite subject, made up of various strands. Its chief components were geometry and astronomy, vital for identifying the size and position of places on the globe with reference to their latitude, established from projections such as meridians and the Arctic circle. Strabo, however, viewed geography as also deeply intertwined with history: the inhabited world was, in his view, significant because it was primarily the stage for human action. At one point, he expresses how sufficiently important monuments, with important stories attached to them, can become almost a ‘natural’ feature of a place:
Different places exhibit different good and bad attributes… some due to nature and others resulting from human design… Of the latter attributes [those resulting from human design], one should make a point of mentioning those which can persist for a long time, or else those which do not persist for long and yet still possess a certain distinction and fame, which, by enduring to later times, make a work of man, even when it no longer exists, a kind of natural attribute of a place.
(2.5.17)
Strabo refers frequently to historical sources, such as Ephorus’ universal history, and Polybius’ history of Rome’s rise to power. Strabo himself wrote historical works (now lost) before embarking on his Geography: he states that his Historical Sketches (Historika Hypomnemata) were intended as a continuation of Polybius (11.9.3), whose work concluded in 146 BCE.
History for Strabo encompassed both rationalised myth and more recent history. His Geography includes short narratives of ‘great men’, from Alexander to Pompey, but also of powerful women throughout history and up to his present day, including his contemporary Pythodoris, the client-queen of Pontus, Cilicia and Cappadocia:
But the Tibareni and Chaldaei, extending as far as Colchis, and Pharnacia and Trapezus are ruled by Pythodoris, a woman who is wise, and empowered to oversee affairs of state…
(12.3.29)
Strabo did not view human history in isolation from the natural world. His study of geography involved the mutual shaping of nature and culture: his work shows curiosity about the effects of environmental factors on human communities, as well as humans’ impact on their environments. Ethnography and natural history are thus also focuses of the work, and Strabo records a wealth of detail on plants and animals. Here, Strabo records the tale of how Alexander the Great's troops mistook a group of long-tailed langur monkeys for armed men in the Emodi mountains (probably the westernmost regions of the Himalayas):
They report on the vast number and incredible size of the monkeys in that forest. This resulted once in the Macedonians getting the impression that they were an army, seeing a crowd of them standing on some bare hills, drawn up like the front-line. For this animal is human-like in its mentality, no less so than the elephant. They set out to attack them, as if they were enemies, but Taxiles, the king at that time, informed them of the truth, and they desisted.
(15.1.29)
The Geography offers information about the history of scholarship, the state of geographical knowledge at an important place and time, and the cultural uses which this knowledge was put to. It is also an important source on stories of humans and animals in natural environments: Strabo refers to this sub-discipline as ‘terrestrial history’, meaning the variations in plants and animals across land and sea which he saw as characterising different locations.
Legacy
Although the Geography appears to have languished unpublished for some time after Strabo’s death c. 24 CE, references to it appear in the work of Athenaeus of Naucratis (2nd-3rd CE). Along with Claudius Ptolemy, the geographer of the 2nd century CE, Strabo was highly influential on the ideas of Byzantine geographical writing.
Both Strabo and Ptolemy were also widely consulted in the 15th and 16th centuries, representing respectively the ‘historical’ and ‘mathematical’ modes of geography. Several editions of the Geography were printed in the 16th century, including those by Aldus Manutius at Venice, Marcus Hopper at Basel, and Isaac Casaubon at Geneva. Scholars from the Florentine humanist Francesco Berlinghieri to Strabo’s editors Hopper and Casaubon commented on the practical benefit of reading such a text, reflecting Strabo’s own views on his Geography’s utility: Strabo clearly suited the humanist ideals of an informed and active civilian life, widespread in Renaissance thought. European bureaucracies at this time were also seeking out current and historical information in the production of regional chorographies: the German and Swiss states embarking on such projects, in particular, looked to Strabo's Geography as a model for how to accomplish these aims.
