Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

What Pausanias did for Greece was done for the geography of the entire Roman Empire by Strabo, born farther east in the city of Amasia (in modern central north Turkey). The year Strabo was born, 63 BC, Amasia became part of the Roman Empire on the death of the defiant Pontic monarch Mithridates. Strabo supported the burgeoning project of Roman imperialism. But he never doubted that the giants on whose intellectual shoulders he stood were products of Greek, rather than Roman, culture. Strabo thought hard about the intellectual discipline of geography. He maintained that measuring the earth and ignoring the human population upon it was to overlook the wood for the trees. He insisted that geographers, while taking their departure from measurements of the world in its entirety, have a distinctive role. This is to explain our “inhabited world,” the oikoumene (from which we derive our word “ecumenical”). Strabo’s seventeen-book Geography thus conceived the discipline ahead of his time, moving through the whole world the Greeks and Romans knew, beginning at the Pillars of Heracles in the Straits of Gibraltar and advancing clockwise around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It explains the nature of peoples in the context of places they inhabited, from Ireland to India, Libya to the Caucasus.