Princeton and Oxford (2024) h/b 1062pp £55 (ISBN 9780691243139)
Potential users of this stupendous work need to understand that the ‘Modern World’ does not refer to the English language as she is totes spoke like in the 21st century like, but to the author’s decision to ensure that Strabo’s geographical information should be aligned with the conventions of the authoritative classical Barrington Atlas and, where possible, also converted into English equivalents.
Strabo (c. 60 BC–c. AD 25), a Greek (and probably a Roman citizen) was born into a political family in northern Asia Minor and educated there and in Rome. The title of his seventeen-book Geôgraphia would suggest a description of a land or country. But he prefers to call it a chôrographia (‘description of a place, locale, region’), and by that he means the true location of, and individual details about, all the places in the Roman Empire which he has visited or of which he is aware. Further, he unites it with the disciplines of astronomy and geometry, all part of the same cosmic package.
But he also says that he will ‘immerse himself in what is splendid and great and in which there is an element of the practical, memorable and delightful’, and he is true to his words. Where there is such information to impart about the places he is mentioning—geographical, historical, mythical, cultural, architectural, artistic, meteorological, geological, economic, fauna, flora, ancient, modern and so on—he lets us know, whether he has seen it, heard of it, read of it, or simply speculates about it. It makes for a rich pot-pourri.
Strabo summarises the purpose of his work by saying that ‘it is aimed at the politician and useful for the people in the same way as the writing of history’. As he puts it: ‘The greatest actions belong to commanders of armies who are able to rule over earth and sea, bringing together nations and cities under one authority and political administration. It is clear then that geography as a whole is relevant to the activities of leaders since it differentiates the continents and the seas (some of the seas being inside the lived-in world as a whole, and some of them outside) … they keep each part in hand more effectively if they know how large the territory is, how it is disposed, and what its distinctions are in terms of the environment and the land itself.’
Further, he closes the work with a brief summary of the scope of the whole Roman Empire which is ‘the best and most famous part of the lived-in world …[and] surpasses all earlier ruling powers that I know of’, and of the ‘kings, dynasts and decarchies [which] are included in Caesar’s portion and always have been.’ To put it simply, this is a hymn in praise of Roman imperial power at the time of Augustus.
It is also something of a polemic, in which he takes on earlier Greek geographers such as Eratosthenes, Hipparchus and others to show that they are regularly wrong, while crediting Homer with the invention of geography (!), and therefore always right (well, mostly, but always getting α for effort). Indeed, he devotes most of book one to a discussion of such sources. Strabo is particularly hard—and particularly wrong—on Pytheas, who famously toured north-west Europe and circumnavigated the British Isles in the late 4th century BC, accusing him of being ‘a man of extreme mendacity’.
Strabo’s ‘lived-in world’, as Sarah Pothecary (P.) calls it, covers from Great Britain in the West across Poland, Ukraine and Kazakhstan to India in the east, and from Denmark in the north to a line running from Morocco to Somalia in the south. Following Strabo’s plan of the work, P. cleverly structures his 17-book masterpiece into five elegantly translated chapters, covering: (1) geography (how to study it) and geographers (Strabo on his sources); (2) a description of the lived-in world; (3) Europe (Western Europe; Eastern Europe, Greece); (4) Asia (northern and southern); and (5) Libya (i.e. Africa), closing with an epilogue on the Roman Empire. Each chapter begins with a map of the area under consideration—they do a superb job of making sense of Strabo’s text, which at times is almost impenetrable on this subject—interlaced with succinct and informative essays in which P. expands on that chapter’s contents, problems and other features of interest.
Inevitably the translated text of a work of such scope and complexity requires a vast amount of explanatory information to make it fit for the ‘Modern World’. The pages are quarto size. The text, which is centred, occupies just less than half the page, and in the margins on either side of the text, and at the bottom of the page, there emerges a modern miracle for the modern world: everything you need to make sense of Strabo, before you very eyes! First and foremost, names e.g. ‘Ispalis (Sevilla, Sp.’); identifications e.g. ‘he = Homer’; explanations e.g. ‘outer sea = Atlantic’ and very importantly the names of Strabo’s sources (whose words when quoted appear in italics in the text), together with any other information that P. feels is necessary to explain what is going on. O si sic omnes …
As for her reference system, P. follows the practice of her source-edition (Stefan Radt [2002-11]). That edition is based on the text of Isaac Casaubon (1620: yes, it’s that one …), who divided the text into 840 numbered sections, each beginning C (e.g. C 1, C 267, C 492). Each paragraph in P. is thus marked—number first, C following, and following that, the line-numbers of Casaubon’s text (e.g. 224 C, 1-5, 224 C 6-23, 769 C 18-42 etc.). These, closely matching the translation, appear in the left-hand column. In the right-hand column appear the references to the Loeb edition (1932), by its traditional book number and chapter. All cross references to Strabo follow P.’s Casaubon system.
This is absolutely admirable, though there is a lot of white space per page, and one wonders whether the text size could have gone up a point or so. It is even smaller in footnotes and the directories at the back.
Those three directories provide access by their modern name to all the countries, regions and areas mentioned in Strabo’s work; to every ancient name in Strabo (over 3,000 places, humans, gods, etc.); and to selected topics and themes (beer, cannibals, human sacrifice, imports to Rome, jokes and witticisms, proverbs, Strabo as eyewitness, and so on). Since in fashionable circles Strabo is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Homer Simpson, your reviewer investigated the jokes. They are well past their tell-by date, though ἱστός provides a(n in-) decent play on words by a female prostitute (378 C, 22-30).
P. is an ‘independent classics scholar’. Given the rigour, scope and depth of her achievement, one is compelled to say that is not surprising: if she had proposed such an all-consuming project to most universities these days, a porter would have been summoned to lead her gently away. To have taken it on, brought it to fruition and found a publisher is a remarkable achievement in itself, and a tribute both to her own ironclad determination and to those who have so willingly backed her throughout. It is greatly to the credit of the University of Toronto in Canada to have stood by her over the years.
This life’s work is a monument to scholarship at its best and surely both encourages and lays a firm foundation for future research on Strabo’s astonishing work—one of the most quoted books in the ancient world—and now more comprehensible than it has ever been to anyone apart (perhaps) from its ancient readers. At the price it is an outstanding bargain.
Peter Jones