Strabo: The Anatolian who failed of Roman recognition

Abstract

Josephus almost invariably calls Strabo the Cappadocian. But he belonged not to Great Cappadocia, the home of Basil and the two Gregories, but to Cappadocia Pontica, more usually called Pontus. ‘Amaseia, my fatherland, a very strong city’ was his birthplace. ‘My city is situate in a large, deep valley, through which flows the river Iris. Both by human design and by nature it is admirably laid out, affording the advantage of both a city and a fortress: for it is a high, precipitous rock which descends steeply to the river, and has on one side the wall on the river edge where is the settled city, and on the other the wall that runs up on either side to the twin peaks.’ It had a water-supply which could not be cut off, passages being cut through the rock to the springs, and two bridges, one to the suburbs and another from the suburbs to the outside country. Its territory was larger and better than that of any other Pontic town. Within its walls were the palace and tombs of the Pontic kings: he certainly means the Pontic Achaemenids, not the Polemones. He adds that it was given to kings, but is now provincial. The era is fixed by coinage to 2 B.C., when it was annexed to the province of Galatia. It was still a metropolis in Christian times with many subordinate bishoprics, and we last hear of it as wrecked by an earthquake in the reign of Justinian. It is generally agreed that Strabo did not return to his native place to spend the last years of his life: he probably had no relatives left there.