Lightfoot rightly opens her slim volume thus: ‘Strabo of Amasia is one of those ancient authors who is cited frequently and appreciated very little’ (p. 1). Strabo is a daunting author: at nearly 350,000 Greek words; 923 pages in Pothecary’s 2024 translation; 740 packed pages in D. Roller’s 2014 translation (The Geography of Strabo); 8 Loeb volumes; 4 volumes of text and facing German translation in S. Radt’s 2002–2011 edition; 15 Budé volumes (with facing French translation and commentary, 1969–2014); plus several partial collections. Strabo’s dense and nested style does not invite a light reading, it can be a challenge to disambiguate Strabo from his layers of sources, as both Pothecary and Roller note in their introductory notes. Strabo is perhaps better savoured in smaller bites.

That said, Strabo has deservedly enjoyed a renaissance of scholarly inquiry over the past quarter century. Contributing to this conversation are K. Clarke’s Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World (1999); D. Dueck’s Strabo of Amaseia: A Greek Man of Letters in Augustan Rome (2000); Strabo’s Cultural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia, edited by D. Dueck, H. Lindsay, S. Pothecary (2006); The Routledge Companion to Strabo, edited by D. Dueck (2017); D. Roller, A Historical and Topographical Guide to the Geography of Strabo (2018); F.P. Bianchi, Strabone e il teatro. La biblioteca drammatica della Geografia (2020), and a growing collection of shorter studies in French, Italian, German and English. Strabo is clearly an author who invites further dialogue, including the two volumes under review here.

We start with Lightfoot’s Strabo, divided into six thematic chapters. In the first chapter Lightfoot considers Strabo’s lineage, Pontic origins and family ties with the ruling family as well as education and travels. In order to appreciate Strabo fully, it is also necessary to understand his intellectual disposition. He declares ‘polymatheia (wide learning), the only thing which makes this geographical work possible’ (1.1.1): geography is thus polymathic.Footnote ¹

For Strabo Homer is a fundamental and foundational source of geographical knowledge, owing to the epic poet’s global reach. Homer lurks ‘in the landscape of the present’ (p. 45) and serves as a connective arc in Lightfoot’s volume. In part, this is because Strabo sees value in poetry (and myth) for teaching and learning.Footnote ² Nonetheless, Lightfoot observes (pp. 36–40) that Strabo occasionally takes geography as proof of mythological stories, i.e. to explain the Stony Plain (Plain de la Crau, near Arles), where Zeus supplied Heracles with stones against the Ligurians (4.1.7). But elsewhere Strabo rejects the validity of a myth on the strength of logic and science, as with the Arethusa Spring (6.2.4), which is not in the least salty and cannot originate across the Ionian Sea in the Alpheus River. He seems to prefer older sources to contemporary ones, and critical scrutiny must be brought to bear.Footnote ³ For example, Alexander’s officers deliberately manipulated geography (i.e. transferring the toponym Caucasus to India) to heroise Alexander, who had travelled further than mythological heroes (i.e. Heracles, who would free Prometheus bound to the Caucasus). Lightfoot observes that Strabo is presenting himself as a ‘reliable, autoptic traveller, geographer and historian whose interest in the geography and topography of Egypt [and elsewhere] is able to correct and refute the lies of previous famous travellers’ (p. 72), as with his ‘corrections’ of Herodotus’ account of the Nile in his own vividly detailed description of Egypt, which he had himself explored (p. 86).

Strabo also forefronts Roman geographical pre-eminence: the growth of Roman imperial power results in an increase of geographical knowledge (as was the case for Alexander’s advances eastward). The synthesis of geography and Roman power is another sustained trope, explaining the city’s founding and her growing hegemony. The ‘savage’ in turn learns to live in a citizen-like manner owing to the benefits of peace and culture, in alignment with theories of environmental determinism. Strabo’s complex engagement with Roman authority wavers between censure and praise, perhaps hearkening back to his grandfather’s pro-Roman revolt against Mithridates VI with an apparent promise of favour from Pompey, thwarted by Lucullus (p. 7). Regarding Roman destruction and looting of Corinth in 146 bce, Strabo’s censure is palpable, but Augustus’ restoration of the city and repatriation of some artwork, Lightfoot argues, shows the emperor’s reformation of the city and the Greek past.Footnote ⁴ Strabo’s use of Homer (and the Jason legend), furthermore, connects the Homeric poems to Rome (p. 11) by proving Greek influence on Italy long before the founding of Rome (p. 67), and establishes continuity between Hellas and Rome, especially through Aeneas and Evander (pp. 112–13) (as well as many Homeric Greek heroes who came to southern Italy, where they founded settlements). Strabo also Stoicises Augustus, whose pronoia (Stoic ‘foresight’) is in part responsible for imperial Rome’s success (p. 110). The Geography, finally, closes with an appreciation of the connection between geography and the Roman Empire: ‘without the benefit of Greeks’ geographical knowledge … the Romans would have struggled to conquer the lands of the Mediterranean and beyond in such an impressive and comprehensive fashion’ (p. 21). Rome, Lightfoot observes, gets the last word in Strabo’s Geography.

The volume closes with a survey of ‘Strabo’s Reception and Legacy’. Lightfoot intriguingly interrogates how the Geography contributed to Renaissance questions regarding the circumnavigation of Africa / Libya (which Strabo denounced as impossible) and what one might encounter sailing westward in the Atlantic: among other things, Christopher Columbus’ son, Ferdinand, affirms Strabo’s influence on his father, who was acquainted with the geographer in Latin translation (Historie del S.D. Fernando Colombo [1571]).

One assumes that the intended audience of this new book is the educated lay person (or perhaps university undergraduates), likely without prior knowledge of Strabo. The short collection is occasionally repetitive: Strabo’s claim that no one has travelled as extensively as he is repeated twice (pp. 14, 85), as is his own four-line precis of his earlier books (pp. 16, 71). The approach is sometimes speculative and undocumented. For example, could Strabo read Latin? Lightfoot says ‘yes’ (p. 95), citing Dueck, Roller and Madsen.Footnote ⁵ She also infers that Leonardo da Vinci’s work on geology echoes Strabo Book 1, i.e. tracing the theory of changing sea levels back to Strabo (while this may be true, evidence is lacking). Leonardo did cite Strabo’s redaction of Posidonius on the size of the sun (3.1.5) (The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci: Complete, trans. J.P. Richter [1888], p. 884), but no other passage. Lightfoot’s volume is a short and selective account lacking the nuance possible in a more extensive treatment.Footnote ⁶ Nonetheless, the book is a pleasant read and a capable introduction that may inspire the Strabonian neophyte to delve more deeply.

We now turn to Pothecary’s volume. There is much to like about this new translation. The budding Greekless Strabo scholar will find the brief general introduction a concise, helpful means of contextualising the man and his work: Pothecary emphasises both the broad scope and the author’s narrative joie de vivre. She is right that the main challenge is ‘how to approach’ the Geography (p. xviii). In sweeping fashion she covers a great deal of important information, including the manuscript tradition, the fraught issue of disputed, fluid, ignored modern state boundaries, the impossibility of creating a graphic map that represents the world as Strabo envisions it (yet, representations of individual regions may be helpful). She is also forthright about the project’s scope: it is a translation, and many good resources are suggested in ‘Use this Translation in Conjunction with …’ (pp. xxv–xxviii). Each ‘chapter’ of the translation (excepting the first) is accompanied by a map, allowing readers to impose Strabo’s world atop the ‘modern’ map. Each of the five ‘chapters’ and subparts is introduced by a useful three-to-four-page precis of Strabo’s content and cartographic approach (i.e. ‘The Virtual Traveler’, where the differences between, say, our ‘Eastern Europe’ and Strabo’s are clarified) and other issues of interest (including scale: i.e. Strabo often devotes more words to places, like the regions of Greece, which are geographically small but culturally, historically significant, which, Pothecary surmises, may mislead modern readers). The translation is attractively laid out with Casaubon page and line numbers, harmonising with Radt’s edition, in the left-hand margin and the traditional book, chapter, paragraph citations in the right-hand margin (Pothecary labels these as ‘older style’, implying that the new methodology will be adopted. What is new here are the line numbers appended to the sixteenth-century Casaubon page numbers.). The right-hand marginalia present modern designations of Strabo’s toponyms (rendered in italics) and clarifications of who ‘he’ might be, useful when Strabo engages simultaneously with multiple authors (these disambiguations are, as Pothecary admits, occasionally contentious, speaking to the density of Strabo’s layers of dialogue with his sources). The headers throughout – both in the top margin and at the beginning of the description of a new region – keep readers geographically grounded. The brief notes (largely relegated to cross-references within the Geography and ‘writerly habits’) are conveniently located at the foot of each page. Like Lightfoot, Pothecary emphasises that Strabo is in conversation with his sources; and the use of italics to indicate where Strabo is recording or redacting a source is a helpful visual aid, enabling readers to distinguish Strabo’s voice from those of his sources. Just as importantly, the translation is fluid and readable.

Readers might find some aspects of the layout distracting, such as brackets to include an explanation of a Greek word within the body of the translation, rendered in italics and in a different font. These translations would be less obtrusive if included in the right-hand marginalia or footnotes. Square brackets are employed to insert omitted words into the translation, again in italics and a different font. Greek is an elliptical language, but educated readers should easily be able to supply these omitted words into any deft translation. For those familiar with Strabo (or any ancient prose work), furthermore, the division into ‘chapters’ may give pause. The arrangement into 17 books is, nonetheless, an artificial construction, having more to do with how much text can be written onto a papyrus roll.

Pothecary is also right to address specially three complex Greek words: oikoumene, ethnos, barbaros. The usual translation for oikoumene, ‘the inhabited world’, Pothecary finds too passive, replacing it instead with ‘the lived-in world’. It may have been cleaner to leave oikoumene in the Greek: it cannot be fully translated into English, and Pothecary’s discussion of the concept sufficiently explains the word’s complexity. But this is the translator’s choice. While I agree with her reasons for rejecting the usual translations of ethnos as ‘tribe’ (I would argue that ‘natives’ is also primitivist), rendering the word as ‘nation’ gives a false impression about the ancient world, which lacked the modern concept of the nation-state; ‘people’ may have perhaps been a better choice. Pothecary rightly reports that Strabo considered barbaroi to be non-Greeks, but she prefers ‘native’ as the translation, a word that is not necessarily pejorative but can still carry negative or stereotypical connotations.

The introductions to the individual ‘chapters’ are informative and helpful, for example describing Greece as the ‘anchor’ of Strabo’s Geography, treated in three books at the centre of the text. Further, Strabo’s geographic engagement with Homer is akin ‘to learning British geography by reading Shakespeare’ (p. 393), but Strabo’s deep reliance on Homer allows an understanding of change over time, especially regarding toponyms and political institutions (p. 393). Furthermore, cardinal directions are not necessarily absolute, but must be understood according to the point of view of the speaker/writer (p. 781). But some details (or omissions) can mislead. In the contextual material Pothecary often refers to ‘maps’, but does not address ‘map-making’ in antiquity.Footnote ⁷ She suggests that linear motion in Strabo depends ‘on the concept of a map’ (p. 342): the underlying concept is, in fact, the periplus (or ‘coasting guide’), a word that she uses only once as a title on p. 946: periplus is nowhere explained in the text.Footnote ⁸

Whether this translation ‘capture[s] the voice of the original author’, as Frankopan states in his forword (p. xiii), cannot be ascertained without a close reading against the Greek text, but some spot-checking suggests that this work, like any translation, is an interpretation, faithful to Strabo’s Greek in varying degrees, but also colloquial in harmony with Pothecary’s authorial voice. Roller’s translation shows greater fidelity to the Greek. Is Pothecary’s translation an improvement over Roller’s? Not necessarily. But this is strictly a question of the reader’s aesthetic preference.

In sum, both volumes reviewed here contribute positively to the growing dialogue on Strabo, but in tone and content both seem pitched more to the educated lay reader than the expert.