Strabo wrote a guide to the known world for statesmen, not stargazers
Strabo boasted that perhaps no geographer before him had visited more places between Tuscany and the borders of Ethiopia. His Geographica is the only surviving work that describes both the Greek and Roman worlds under Augustus, and it deliberately chose people, customs and cities over the astronomers' latitudes and sums.
Born around 64 BC to a wealthy family in Amaseia in Pontus, Strabo came from politically connected stock: relatives served Mithridates VI, and his grandfather handed several Pontic forts to the Romans in return for great promises. He studied rhetoric at Nysa under Aristodemus, grandson of Posidonius, where a school devoted to interpreting Homer probably fed his lifelong admiration for the poet. Moving to Rome around 44 BC, he learned philosophy from the Aristotelian Xenarchus and grammar from Tyrannion, an expert on geography. The Stoic Athenodorus, a tutor of Augustus, drew him toward Stoicism and gave him first-hand knowledge of distant provinces.
The long peace of Augustus's reign made scholarly travel easy. Strabo visited the Aegean island of Gyaros in 29 BC on his way to see the emperor at Corinth, and about 25 BC he sailed up the Nile to Philae. He also mined the great library of Alexandria, a city he later described admiringly for its parks and streets broad enough for chariots, two of them crossing at right angles. His first big work, a history called Historical Sketches, is lost apart from one papyrus scrap in Milan.
The Geography covers Britain and Ireland, Iberia, Gaul, the Alps, Greece, the Black Sea, Anatolia, the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. Strabo acknowledged the mathematical work of Eratosthenes and Hipparchus but argued that description was more useful to rulers. He was first to identify the Danube's upper and lower courses as one river meeting at the Iron Gates. His India, which he never saw, mixes fact and fable: winged scorpions sit beside small flying reptiles that match a real gliding lizard. Centuries later Charles Lyell praised his discussion of why seashells lie buried far from the sea.
The work's last datable reference is to the recent death of Juba II of Mauretania in AD 23, so Strabo probably died about a year later. Byzantine scribes kept copies alive; a Latin translation appeared in Rome around 1469 and the first printed edition in Venice in 1516.
Source: Strabo
