born 64/63 BC, Amaseia, Pontus
 
died AD 23, ?

Greek geographer, historian, and philosopher. Its numerous quotations from technical literature, moreover, provide a remarkable account of the state of Greek geographical science, as well as of the history of the countries it surveys.

Strabo belonged on his mother’s side to a famous family, whose members had held important offices under Mithradates V , as well as under Mithradates the Great, the opponent of Rome. His first teacher was the master of rhetoric Aristodemus, a former tutor of the sons of Pompey in Nysa (now Sultanhisar in Turkey) on the Maeander. He moved to Rome in 44 BC to study with Tyrannion, the former tutor of Cicero, and with Xenarchus, both of whom were members of the Aristotelian school of philosophy. Under the influence of Athenodorus, former tutor of Octavius, who probably introduced him into the future emperor’s circle, he turned toward Stoical philosophy, the precepts of which included the view that one unique principle ceaselessly pervading the whole universe causes all phenomena.

It was in Rome, where he stayed at least until 31 BC, that he wrote his first major works, his 47-book Historical Sketches, published around 20 BC, of which but a few quotations survive. A vast and eclectic compilation, it was meant as a continuation of Polybius’ Histories. The Historical Sketches covered the history of the known world from 145 BC that is, from the conquest of Greece by the Romans to the Battle of Actium , or to the beginnings of the principate of the Roman emperor Augustus.

In 29 BC, Strabo visited the island of Gyaros in the Aegean Sea, on his way to Corinth, Greece, where Augustus was staying. In 25 or 24, together with Aelius Gallus, prefect of Egypt, who had been sent on a military mission to Arabia, he sailed up the Nile as far as Philae. There are then no further references to him until AD 17, when he attended the triumph of the Roman general Germanicus Caesar in Rome. He died after having devoted his last years to compiling his second important work, his Geographical Sketches. Judging by the date when he wrote his personal notes, he must have worked on the book after his stay in Egypt and then have put it aside from 2(?) BC to AD 14, when he started the final edition, which he brought to an end in AD 23.

The first two books, in effect, provide a definition of the aims and methods of geography by criticizing earlier works and authors. Strabo found fault with the map designing of the Greek scholar Eratosthenes, who lived from c. 276 to c. 194 BC; Eratosthenes had combined astronomical data with coast and road measurements, but Strabo found his work lacking in precision. Although Strabo closely followed the treatise against Eratosthenes of the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, who had lived in the 2nd century BC, he blamed Hipparchus for neglecting the description of the Earth. On the other hand, he appreciated Polybius, who, in addition to his historical works, had written two books on European geography that Strabo admired for their descriptions of places and peoples. Although he praised Posidonius, the Greek historian and philosopher who lived from about 135 to 51 BC, for his knowledge of physical geography and ethnography, he rejected Posidonius’ theory of climatic zones and particularly his hypothesis that the equatorial zone was habitable. This critical study led him logically to decide in favour of a descriptive type of geography, based on a map with an orthogonal  projection. The problem of projecting the sphere on a flat surface is not dealt with at any length, for his work, as he said, was not designed for mathematicians but for statesmen who must know countries, natural resources, and customs.

In books III to VI, Strabo described successively Iberia, Gaul, and Italy, for which his main sources were Polybius and Posidonius, both of whom had visited these countries; in addition, Artemidorus, a Greek geographer born around 140 BC and author of a book describing a voyage around the inhabited Earth, provided him with a description of the coasts and thus of the shape and size of countries. Book VII was based on the same authorities and described the Danube Basin and the European coasts of the Black Sea. Writing about Greece, in books VIII to X, he still relied upon Artemidorus, but the bulk of his information was taken from two commentators of Homer Apollodorus of Athens  and Demetrius of Scepsis (born around 205 BC) for Strabo placed great emphasis on identifying the cities named in the Greek epic the Iliad. Books XI to XIV describe the Asian shores of the Black Sea, the Caucasus, northern Iran, and Asia Minor. Here Strabo made the greatest use of his own observations, though he often quoted historians who dealt with the wars fought in these regions and cited Demetrius on problems of Homeric topography in the region about ancient Troy. India and Persia (Book XV) were described according to information given by the historians of the campaigns of Alexander the Great , whereas his descriptions of Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, and the Red Sea (Book XVI) were based on the accounts of the expeditions sent out by Mark Antony  and by the emperor Augustus, as well as on chapters on ethnography in Posidonius and on the book of a Red Sea voyage taken by the Greek historian and geographer Agatharchides (2nd century BC). Strabo’s own memories of Egypt, supplemented by the writings of Posidonius and Artemidorus, provided material for the substance of Book XVII, which dealt with the African shores of the Mediterranean Sea and with Mauretania.