CUP (2024, two vols) h/b 1240pp £220.00 (ISBN Vol 1: 9781009194204; Vol 2: 9781009184229)
Odysseus, so Homer tells us, wandered widely, visiting many cities and learning the ways of many peoples, while, in its Catalogue of Ships, the Homeric Iliad famously takes us on a whistlestop ‘armchair’ tour round many of the important locations of late Bronze-Age and Iron-Age Greece perhaps using material drawn from the work of centuries of earlier poets. These two ways of understanding the wider world—autopsy and what might be called scholarship—permeate all subsequent geographical writing, not least the 36 examples collected and translated in these two stunning volumes. The different motivations implied by the Homeric prototypes (the Catalogue’s ‘scholasticism’ and the Odyssean blend of adventure, trade and conquest) are reflected, too, though S. rightly warns against viewing the writers through ‘a 21st-century lens, for example post-colonial theory—to see Greek geographical writing as largely tainted with the ancient equivalent of imperialism or Orientalism; to see all investigation and exploration as acquisitive or aggressive’.
The collection is not intended to be exhaustive. Space forbids inclusion of such giants as Strabo and Pausanias. Rather, ‘an overriding aim of this book and its organization is to make hitherto recherché texts more accessible’, and in this S. succeeds brilliantly. Dividing the material into historical periods (Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Antique), he presents a dazzling range of writers from the obscure and early shamanistic Aristeias, who wrote of griffins guarding gold, and Skylax, who travelled to India on the orders of the Persian Great King, Darius, through the classical Pytheas, on whose account of Britain and Thule Strabo poured scorn, the Hellenistic Poseidonius, a towering intellectual, Dikaiarchus, part of whose motivations for travel may have been to calculate the earth’s circumference, and the Roman-era King Juba II of Mauretania, whose work influenced generations of later scholars, to Late Antique anonymous accounts that pillaged earlier sources, sometimes without fully understanding them.
On the way, we meet the third century B.C. Herakleides Kritikos with his parodic journey through mainland Greece, Arrian whose Circumnavigation of the Euxine is part military and diplomatic report, part fantastical mythological guidebook, and part private correspondence addressed to his friend, the Emperor Hadrian, and the unvarnished writings of a man known today as pseudo-Hippolytus, whose catalogue of anchorages and springs may have been a captain’s or pilot’s manual. We encounter, too, a work translated into Greek (the Carthaginian Hanno’s voyage round Africa) as well as works which survive in Latin but may have been written in Greek or which are heavily dependent on Greek originals (for example, the mid fourth-century A.D. Expositio Totius Mundi and Avienus’ Ora Maritima).
Thanks to his careful curation, S. succeeds in bringing cohesion to this wide-ranging collection of writers, whose ways of working and intentions are so disparate. Each receives a brief yet comprehensive introduction outlining what we know of their biography, discussing their methodology, motivations and influence, and furnishing a selected further reading. This is especially important because of the patchy nature of their survival, some relatively complete, others in fragments, still others in tantalising allusions where it is difficult to sift the original writer’s aim from that of the author who quotes it. Most of the entries are by S. himself and, although other scholars (14 in all) are responsible for certain specific geographers, his clarity and high standard of writing is maintained throughout. In addition to the text there are 28 maps, 15 illustrations (of manuscripts) and one diagram (showing Timosthenes’ wind rose) as well as copious footnotes, lists of sources of extracts and works cited, concordances of extracts by chapter and source author, and a selective index.
Although not inexpensive, this magisterial book, admirable in its range and clarity, succeeds brilliantly in its aim to introduce the Greek geographers to a wider readership, and, while it will most likely be found in institutional libraries, it deserves to inhabit the shelves of anyone interested in how our understanding of the world developed throughout Antiquity and how it was perceived for over more than a millennium by inquiring men—and women. For in the course of a journey that reveals lost landscapes such as the coastline of the Bosporus, thick with temples, and is peppered with unexpected insights (I did not know that, using chains, the sea could be charted to the depth of a mile), we meet albeit fleetingly one female geographer, Hestiaia, perhaps from Alexandria Troas, who investigated the plain of Troy and wrote about the Iliad of Homer. And so (like the earth itself, whose spherical nature was known throughout much of Antiquity) we come full circle.
David Stuttard