Understanding Classics

This book provides a short and accessible introduction to Strabo's life, times and cultural context. It outlines the importance of geography and geographical writing in the Augustan period and its development in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as explaining Strabo's significance and impact in antiquity and beyond. Jessica Lightfoot also explores how Strabo engages heavily with the works of Homer and other prominent Greek literary figures of the past. Our ancient geographer has much to tell us about myth, fiction and literature and their relation to geographical and historical prose. As a result, the reader is given an insight into the fundamentally philosophical origins of geography and the first development of that discipline in antiquity.

Strabo of Amasia is known to us today as the writer of the Geography, a seventeen-book monumental survey of the known world which dates to the early first century AD. As the earliest major ancient geographer whose work we possess, Strabo occupies an important place in the history of ancient culture, literature and science. His work is crucial in assessing the emergence of geography as a discipline. Its later reception had an important impact on conceptions of the world and the development of geographical and travel writing, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries.