Strabo: The First Geographer

Strabo of Amasia (c.63 BC-AD 24) holds the distinction of having written the first extant descriptive geography in the Western world. We might term him ‘the first geographer’, though in his opinion this term would be much too narrow to encompass his many talents. He saw himself as both a historian and philosopher whose magnum opus, the sprawling 17-book Geography, made sense of both the past and the present. The book, written in Greek, covers the entirety of the known world in the first century AD, describing the land and culture as well as the history of each region. Strabo’s aim in undertaking this monumental task was very clear. At the beginning of his work he claims that his words are essential reading for those interested in ‘political affairs and in matters that concern leaders’, and especially for anyone interested in imperial expansion:

The greatest commanders are able to rule over land and sea, bringing peoples and cities together under one power and political control, and for this reason it is clear that geography is pertinent to the activities of leaders, since it sets forth continents and seas, both those within and outside the limits of the whole of the world known to us.

Strabo’s own complex cultural background perhaps explains why he was so keen to stress the political utility of his geographical writing. Born to an elite Greek-speaking family in Pontus, a region in modern-day Turkey that had long been ruled by culturally Greek kings with Persian origins, he saw seismic changes to the political status quo over the course of his long life. The foremost of these was the meteoric and unstoppable rise of Roman power, both in his homeland and far beyond. In the centuries before his birth the Roman city-state had taken control of the rest of Italy before turning its attentions to Spain, North Africa, Greece, and Asia Minor. Pontus was in this region, and Strabo’s family had close links to the last Pontic king, Mithridates VI, who continually fought the Romans until they vanquished him and took his kingdom in 63 BC. Strabo tells us that many of his relatives were members of the inner circle of the Pontic court over several generations, though relations soured when his grandfather revolted at the end of the Mithridatic War (89-63 BC) and handed 15 forts to the Romans.

This change of loyalty greatly influenced the course of Strabo’s life; although he was a Greek speaker raised and educated in Asia Minor, as an adult he travelled to Rome to continue his education in the city’s famous libraries, which now contained many Greek book-rolls carried off from the various Roman conquests. While in the capital Strabo mingled with the highest echelons of the Roman elite and benefited from the close connections his family had developed with powerful politicians. Steeped in Greek cultural learning, originating from a family with ties to the Persian-derived Mithridatic dynasty, and closely connected to some of the most powerful players in the Roman world, it is unsurprising that Strabo wanted to produce a work that grasped the complex geopolitical realities of his time. And what a time it was. Strabo found himself in Rome at the most tumultuous point in its history: the direct aftermath of Caesar and Pompey’s civil wars (49-45 BC), Mark Antony and Octavian’s clashes (32-30 BC), and the eventual, inevitable fall of the Roman Republic and rise of the Roman Empire (27 BC). His Geography was thus conceived against a backdrop of intense change, aimed explicitly at the political elite as the tentacles of Roman imperial power spread in every direction in the wake of the first emperor Augustus’ relentlessly expansionist policies.

Geography – or geographia in Greek, literally meaning ‘writing the world’ – certainly had its place in documenting and cementing the new political realities of Roman imperial power. By describing the extent, history, and geopolitical situation of each region of the known world, Strabo was providing an implicit narrative of the reasons for the rise of Roman power. But when we look closely, several interesting perspectives emerge. Strabo consistently emphasises the continuities between Greek and Roman culture, describing how various Greek heroes and kings had visited or colonised Italy in the distant past, underplaying the importance of native Italian traditions and staking a claim for the potentially Greek origins of the Romans themselves. For example, the mythical Greek heroes Odysseus and Evander were said to have visited Italy and founded settlements full of their own descendants there. Moreover, in the Geography Strabo’s own Hellenic culture has consistently reached and influenced Italy and other lands long before the Romans did: the very heart of Rome’s power, then, becomes Greek.

This distinctively Hellenocentric perspective is apparent throughout the text, occasionally leading to some radically inaccurate geographical claims. Many of the strangest of these – at least, from our perspective – come from his discussions of the two greatest Greek cultural products of the ancient world, Homer’s Iliad (narrating the course of the Trojan War) and the Odyssey (describing the hero Odysseus’ return to Greece from Troy), both dating to the eighth century BC. According to Strabo, Homer was ‘the first who ventured to begin to engage in geography’ and his fictional poems provide historical proof of the Greeks’ colonisation of the world long before the ascent of Roman power. For Strabo, Odysseus’ lengthy sea-journey home is evidence that Greeks had visited Italy many centuries before the rise of Rome – despite the region never being mentioned in this context in the poem. Even Pontus has a connection to the Greek heroes of the past, as Homer’s poems supposedly evidence the visit of Jason and the Argonauts to the nearby northeastern regions of the world ‘around the Propontis and the Euxeinos up to Colchis’ (the Black Sea to modern Georgia) – even if there is no mention of this in the poems themselves.

Strabo gave to posterity a description of the Roman Empire at the very moment of its birth. His work influenced later ideas of how imperial power and colonisation could and should work: we know, for example, that Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) had read the Geography and found in it a vision of the world with gaps to be filled.

Jessica Lightfoot is Lecturer in Greek Literature at the University of Birmingham.