Apart from D. Dueck's useful introduction (Geography in Classical Antiquity [2012]), there has been no survey of ancient geographical thought written in English since Thomson's 1948 History of Ancient Geography. The first challenge in writing a synthesis about ancient geography is that most of the sources for such a project are scattered throughout the corpus of Classical literature, and so the aspiring historian of geography must grapple with a broad variety of literature. The second challenge is that because the Graeco-Roman traditions of geographical thought were largely abandoned in Late Antiquity, many of the most important geographical thinkers have been lost, now found only in fragmentary form in other authors. In order to write the current volume, therefore, in addition to having a firm grasp of the more traditionally recognised geographical writers like Strabo and Ptolemy, R. has had to synthesise an array of works, from major authors like Homer and Euripides to minor works like the Periplous of the Red Sea to the dizzying array of fragments of geographical writers. R.'s last two major projects, an edition and translation of the fragments of Eratosthenes and a translation of Strabo's Geography, have been an invaluable foundation for this current project; as R. himself says of Strabo, ‘the present work would have been impossible without it’ (p. 170).

R.'s book sets out to explore how Graeco-Roman geographical thought – that is, a conception of the world and one's place in it – evolved over time. Chapter 1 begins by examining the state of knowledge about the Mediterranean basin in the earliest periods of Greek history. The first literary accounts which attest to Greek geographical thought can be found, according to R., in the tales of the Argonauts and the Trojan War. R. attributes too much historicity to these accounts, and he admits that these tales developed as both time and knowledge of the Mediterranean progressed, but he is correct when he says that ‘the voyage of the Argo is a mythological remnant of the first long trading voyages made by the Greeks’ (p. 12), and there can be no doubt that the material found in Homer reflects a knowledge and vision of the Eastern Mediterranean. R. continues from this point to discuss the contributions of the Phoenicians towards a topographical knowledge of the world and those of Presocratic philosophers towards a theoretical conception of the world. Chapter 2 continues the discussion of the expansion of knowledge by looking at how Greek settlement, the voyages of various early explorers and Greek interactions with the Persian Empire expanded the Greek world view, primarily of places along the coasts. This chapter concludes with a lengthy discussion of the contributions of Hecataeus, whose description of the inhabited world ‘firmly places [him] in the new world of scholarly ethnography and geography’ (p. 55).

R. breaks the rest of the book into large chronological divisions, examining both the explorers who expanded knowledge of the world and the writers who disseminated this knowledge and contributed important theoretical concepts to geography. Chapter 3 examines the strides made during the Classical period up to the ascendency of Alexander the Great. Although Carthaginian explorers contributed to the knowledge of the Atlantic coasts and Ctesias and Xenophon contributed to the knowledge of India and the interior of Asia Minor, respectively, the real advances in geographical thinking in this period came in the ways that Greek scholars visualised the world and their place in it. Parmenides began theorising about climatic zones, Eudoxus began speculating about the size of the earth and began seeing the world in terms of klimata and Aristotle introduces the term oikoumene to refer to the portion of the globe that we inhabit. R.'s explanations of these concepts, which can be muddled in the ancient sources, are clear and concise and emphasise the strides made during this period in geographical thinking (pp. 71–7). The greatest advance in this period, however, is that made by Ephorus, whose universal history contains, in its fourth and fifth books, what we might finally recognise as a geographical work proper. In these books Ephorus demonstrates ‘his ability to look at the oikoumene as a whole and to bring astronomical data into the ethnographic discussion’ (p. 83).

Chapters 4–6 function as a unit in R.'s narrative to discuss the advances made in geography from the time of Alexander to the ascendency of Rome in the Mediterranean. Chapter 4 discusses Pytheas’ exploration to the far northern reaches of the Atlantic, including the mysterious Thule, and the well-known campaign of Alexander to the Indus. Both of these almost simultaneous expeditions mark the greatest expansion of geographical knowledge in the history of the ancient world, and the consequent intellectual activity that made sense of this knowledge, discussed in Chapter 5, is certainly important, but the greatest contribution to the field of geography in the wake of Alexander's conquests was the work of Eratosthenes and his critic, Hipparchus, discussed in Chapter 6. Eratosthenes, in his Geography – a word he seems to have created (p. 122) – advanced the idea of using meridians and parallels to position the oikoumene more accurately on the globe. He also focused on the shapes of landmasses at the expense of ethnic groups, turning away from ethnography and towards what we might recognise as physical geography. Hipparchus continued this shift away from human geography towards physical geography in his critique of Eratosthenes’ method which relied too heavily on human reports instead of mathematical and astronomical criteria.

Chapters 7–10 mark the shift from Greek geography, characterised primarily by the expansion of knowledge about the oikoumene and geographical theory, to Roman geography, characterised largely by attempts to use geography to explain Rome's centrality in the oikoumene and to fill in small gaps in knowledge through trade and conquest. Tracing Roman expansion after the fall of Carthage in 146 b.c., Chapter 7 focuses on Graeco-Roman expeditions to regions previously poorly known, such as Polybius’ voyage into the Atlantic, Poseidonius’ travels in the west and Caesar's in Gaul. While Chapters 8 and 9 continue to discuss the expansion of knowledge, primarily through military campaigns and trade (Juba II being the major exception to this rule), the real scholarly contribution to geography during the reign of Augustus and the century after his death came in the form of consolidation and publication of prior knowledge by the likes of Strabo, Pomponius Mela and Pliny. While there is still interest in theoretical aspects of geography, as Strabo's kolossourgia (Strabo 1.1.23) demonstrates, most of this theoretical interest was derivative. Even Ptolemy, who stands at the centre of Chapter 10, relied largely on Hipparchus’ mathematical geography, incorporating newly discovered places in his work, particularly in the south and east. It is with Ptolemy that R.'s narrative of ancient geography ends. Geographical exploration still continues, but there is a marked turn from the practical towards the theological in geographical writing, a trend that is not reversed until the Renaissance (pp. 203–5).

Taken as a whole, R. has produced a readable and coherent narrative of the growth of geographical thought in the ancient world. Although there are some editorial issues (a few typos and an incorrect reference to Pomponius Mela 3.38 instead of 3.33 on p. 116, for example), these minor issues do not detract from what R. has accomplished. He has taken an enormous amount of material and, like Strabo, has produced a kolossourgia, useful to the student looking for a broad overview of the subject or the scholar looking for context for a more focused project on ancient geography.