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

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 the hapless host who gave a party to which nobody came. To classicists wedded to the traditional canon, he is "like the whore's child at the wedding," to borrow a phrase from novelist Mary Renault's Mask of Apollo. In the early first century AD, late in his life, he spent six years or so in compiling his notes and memoranda into a lengthy geographical account of the habitable world so that Greeks and Romans might better know the environment in which they lived and moved or in which they would be interested. Strabo never "published" it by depositing copies elsewhere, and it may have been left incompletely revised at the time of his death. But the text gradually appeared in a few ancient libraries, perhaps first in Byzantion. Some Greek scholars in the eastern Roman Empire refer to it, beginning in the late-second century. But it was unknown in the West until the fifteenth century, first through seminars offered by the aged Byzantine scholar Georgios Gemistos Plethon to his Western colleagues at the Ecumenical Council in Florence in 1439-1440 and subsequently through a Latin translation. In the late-nineteenth century, Exeter College scholar Henry Fanshaw Tozer's attempts to insert Strabo into the ossified Oxford classical curriculum, especially through his Selections From Strabo (1893), went nowhere. In the 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 a committee of classicists and geographers on such a project was confounded by the outbreak of World War I. Similar efforts in t938 were made by the American classicist W. A. Oldfather, representing the American Philological Association, to interest John K. Wright (son of a Harvard professor of Greek) in a joint effort to create a new critical text and translation, to be published by the American Geographical Society. But these apparently foundered on the Society's Depression-era financial problems, and the project was rendered moot by the outbreak of World War II. A little-known anthology, Greek Geography, published in t934 in the "Library of Greek Thought" series, includes a number of excerpts from Strabo, translated by the volume's editor, Eric Warmington. The standard English-language translation until now has been that of Horace L. Jones in the Loeb Classical Library series, published in eight volumes between 1917 and 1932. It is, however, largely based on Greek texts compiled in the 1840s and 1850s by two German scholars and has long been known to be obsolete. The volume under review is a long-awaited complete English translation of the Geographia, based in recent scholarship on the Greek text. Unlike the 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, a list of fragments restudied for the new edition, a useful brief selection from the enormous Strabonic bibliography, and a detailed and helpful index. The translator and editor of this important volume, Duane Roller, is professor emeritus of classics at the Ohio State University and is both a classical scholar and an experienced archaeologist. Roller is also well versed in the history of classical geography, and in 2010 produced the first English-language translation and edition of the 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 the 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 . …