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The greatest geographer of antiquity flourished during the whole rule of Augustus (22 B.C.--14 A.D.), and the early part of the rule of Tiberius, and his work was not completed until 19 A.D. We know almost nothing about his life.
STRABO was a native of Amasia, in Pontus, probably a Greek by birth, of a family on the mother's side, which held high office under the royal house of Mithridates. He travelled young and had the best education of his time, visited Greece in 29 B.C., and then spent some years in Rome. In 24 B.C. he travelled in Egypt, and went up the Nile. He travelled in Greece, central Italy, the coast of Africa, and in Asia Minor. But he soon afterwards withdrew to his native town in Pontus, which is now Rumili, and there compiled, almost entirely from Greek sources, his great work on Geography. It remained unknown for a century, and is not mentioned by Pliny. It was not until the third century that the importance of his labours was duly recognized.
The "colossal work" of Strabo has been well described by Humboldt (Cosmos, vol. ii. part 2), who says that, though Strabo did not possess the accuracy of Hipparchus or the knowledge of Ptolemy, yet his work "surpasses all the geographical writings of antiquity, both in grandeur of plan and in the abundance and variety of its materials." Sir E. Bunbury says (History of Ancient Geography, ii. 330): "If we regard the science of geography in all its branches, no other ancient writer can compare with Strabo." The 17 books of his geography were designed as a complete geography of the habitable world, mathematical, physical, political, and historical. It was not intended as a popular work, as a physical philosophy, nor as a manual or gazetteer. It was designed for statesmen rather than philosophers or men of science, and gives a general picture of the physical, social, and historical conditions of each country. The descriptive and historical side of his work is far better than the mathematical. The purely geographical conceptions are based on those of Hipparchus and Eratosthenes; and in some points show an actual retrogression from the knowledge of the great Alexandrines. There are some ingenious physical hypotheses, amongst them that of other continents--an idea adopted by Seneca in his Medea; but Strabo added nothing from the mathematical point of view proper. His conception of the habitable world is very imperfect and faulty; and, though he grossly overrates many distances, he makes the world far too small. With him Ireland is the most northerly point, the Red Sea is the most southerly, and the mouths of the Ganges the eastern limit. This world is a vast island, surrounded by ocean, of which the Caspian and the Persian gulf formed arms--i.e. with only about 100 degrees of longitude and about 50 degrees of latitude.
The physical description of countries, especially of those which he had visited, was good, and the immense industry with which he collected accounts of the political and ethnical conditions of countries is invaluable to us. He is not very critical as to his sources, treating Homer as a paramount authority, distrusting Heredotus, and relying mainly on Greek books rather than Roman travellers. But his accounts of the native races of distant lands--and still more of Asia Minor and Egypt, which he knew well--are of the utmost value to the historian. And with all its inevitable imperfections, the Geography of Strabo forms a landmark in the history of science as the first serious attempt to found a complete concrete science of the planet on which man is placed.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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