The Geography of Strabo: An English Translation, with Introduction and Notes

Abstract

THE GEOGRAPHY OF STRABO: An English Translation, with Introduction and Notes. Translated by Duane W. Roller, xv and 891 pp; maps, bibliog., index. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2014. $190.00 (cloth), isbn 9781107038257. Poor Strabo! To geographers he is hapless host who gave party to which nobody came. To classicists wedded to traditional canon, he is like whore's child at wedding, to borrow phrase from novelist Mary Renault's Mask of Apollo. In early first century AD, late in his life, he spent six years or so in compiling his notes and memoranda into lengthy geographical account of habitable world so that Greeks and Romans might better know environment in which they lived and moved or in which they would be interested. Strabo never it by depositing copies elsewhere, and it may have been left incompletely revised at time of his death. But text gradually appeared in ancient libraries, perhaps first in Byzantion. Some Greek scholars in eastern Roman Empire refer to it, beginning in late-second century. But it was unknown in West until fifteenth century, first through seminars offered by aged Byzantine scholar Georgios Gemistos Plethon to his Western colleagues at Ecumenical Council in Florence in 1439-1440 and subsequently through Latin translation. In late-nineteenth century, Exeter College scholar Henry Fanshaw Tozer's attempts to insert Strabo into ossified Oxford classical curriculum, especially through his Selections From Strabo (1893), went nowhere. In twentieth century, several complete English-language editions were proposed and some even begun, but only one reached publication. An attempt by classicist (and classical geographer) John Linton Myres to bring together committee of classicists and geographers on such project was confounded by outbreak of World War I. Similar efforts in t938 were made by American classicist W. A. Oldfather, representing American Philological Association, to interest John K. Wright (son of Harvard professor of Greek) in joint effort to create new critical text and translation, to be published by American Geographical Society. But these apparently foundered on Society's Depression-era financial problems, and project was rendered moot by outbreak of World War II. A little-known anthology, Greek Geography, published in t934 in of Greek Thought series, includes number of excerpts from Strabo, translated by volume's editor, Eric Warmington. The standard English-language translation until now has been that of Horace L. Jones in Loeb Classical Library series, published in eight volumes between 1917 and 1932. It is, however, largely based on Greek texts compiled in 1840s and 1850s by two German scholars and has long been to be obsolete. The volume under review is long-awaited complete English translation of Geographia, based in recent scholarship on Greek text. Unlike Loeb, it does not have that text on its facing pages. It does have an incisive thirty-four page introduction on Strabo's life and work, list of fragments restudied for new edition, useful brief selection from enormous Strabonic bibliography, and detailed and helpful index. The translator and editor of this important volume, Duane Roller, is professor emeritus of classics at Ohio State University and is both classical scholar and an experienced archaeologist. Roller is also well versed in history of classical geography, and in 2010 produced first English-language translation and edition of surviving fragments of another ancient Greek geographer, Eratosthenes. Roller contends that the study of ancient geography also requires fieldwork. So, in preparation for this hefty volume, he visited many of sites mentioned in Strabo's text. Roller's characterization of Strabo's Geography as known to all, quoted by many, and understood by few is undoubtedly correct, as is his description of it as a complex, wandering work . …