Mapped Out

The compound word​ kolossourgia, ‘monumental composition’, is found only once in extant ancient Greek, in a ringing sentence composed by Strabo of Amaseia. He uses it to convey the scope and technique of his Geographica, an atlas in written form describing all the lands known to the Greeks and Romans of his day. In a passage introducing the work, Strabo invokes the analogy of gigantic sculptures such as the Colossus of Rhodes. ‘Just as in colossal statues one does not seek accurate detail but focuses rather on the general question of whether the work as a whole is well executed,’ Strabo writes (in Sarah Pothecary’s translation), ‘so one should exercise similar judgment in the case of this work. It, too, is a colossus [kolossourgia], dealing with mega-issues and general matters.’ He concludes by making an even grander claim for what his work will accomplish: ‘The task before me is a serious one, and one that befits a philosopher.’

The era in which Strabo lived, the saddle between the first centuries bc and ad, was highly receptive to kolossourgiai. The Rhodians’ monument to their patron deity, Helios, was in ruins by that time, destroyed by an earthquake, but in Rome, where Strabo spent his twenties and to which he returned in his fifties or sixties, another colossal work was taking shape. In the late first century bc, Marcus Agrippa, right-hand man to the emperor Augustus, commissioned an enormous display (whether made by paint or engraving is unclear) of the entire orbis terrarum, the part of the globe then known. This hugely ambitious map, rectangular in shape and perhaps as large as sixty feet long, occupied a wall in the highly public Portico of Vipsania (named for Agrippa’s sister). Completed by Augustus after Agrippa’s death, it later disappeared without a trace, but Strabo almost certainly made use of it when composing the Geographica, and through him it was passed on to the makers of medieval mappae mundi and authors of early cosmographies.

The Augustan Romans, masters of a tricontinental empire, had need of works like Agrippa’s orbis terrarum and Strabo’s Geographica that could help them conceptualise their vast domain. A Greek who wrote only in Greek, Strabo addressed himself largely to bilingual Roman readers and especially to those he calls hoi prattontes, ‘the doers’, perhaps best translated as ‘the movers and shakers’. These elite males, he assumes, will need detailed knowledge of the world in order to manage or appropriate portions of it, do business within it or lead armies into its as yet un-Romanised areas. Despite the claim of his introduction that philosophers will benefit from his work, his primary interests are practical, not philosophical. Yet he does take an interest in theoretical questions in his first two books (out of seventeen), including the possibility of other ‘worlds’ beyond that formed by Europe, Asia and Africa. At one point he mentions a notion, derived from the Hellenistic geographer Hipparchus, that there may be humans living as far south as the equator, a realm that, for him, was as inaccessible as an alien planet. But then he turns aside from speculation: ‘Even if these parts are inhabited, as some suppose, they nevertheless form … a lived-in world that is not part of our lived-in world. He who describes the world pays attention only to this, our own lived-in world.’

The Geographica was an important reference work for Byzantine scholars and scientists, complementing the more authoritative but less entertaining works of Ptolemy. The Greek humanist Gemistos Plethon brought a copy of Strabo with him to the 1439 ecumenical council in Florence that attempted a reunification of eastern and western churches; he lectured on Strabo to Florentines between council sessions. In this way Strabo’s rather egregious overestimate of the eastern extension of Asia may have reached the ears of the mathematician and cosmographer Paolo Toscanelli, who decades later transmitted it to Christopher Columbus. If so, Strabo’s greatest impact on subsequent ages came from one of his greatest errors.

What interest does Strabo hold for readers who can instantly view all parts of the globe online? According to Pothecary’s subtitle, her doorstopper is ‘a translation for the modern world’, but she seems unclear as to how it is ‘for’ that readership. In an introductory note she concedes that the phrase ‘from the modern world’ would have been no less appropriate, since this edition ‘allows readers to travel back in time and find out what Strabo says about areas of the world now known by different names’. The slide from currency to historical interest starts to blur the book’s raison d’être, and things get blurrier still a few paragraphs on. ‘There is a sort of built-in redundancy to the subtitle “A Translation for the Modern World”,’ Pothecary writes, referring to the changes that constantly redraw our political maps. ‘The modern world of the title will become as outdated as the world described by Strabo.’ This seems to make Strabo not modern at all but the focus of antiquarian obsession.

Perhaps the best argument for this new Geographica is its reliance on a recently improved Greek text, the four-volume edition completed by the German scholar Stefan Radt in 2011, though even in this it is not unique; another specialist in ancient geography, Duane Roller, also made use of Radt’s edition for his 2014 translation, though he did not adopt it exclusively as Pothecary has done. In any case the textual improvements that Pothecary’s edition has made are outweighed by the difficulties it introduces, both by way of the translation itself and by the needlessly complex apparatuses that precede, surround and undergird it.

Translations of ancient authors are always in need of retooling, but prose authors employing a plain, declarative style stand in much less need of updating than, say, Homer (whose epics seem to appear in new versions every month). Pothecary’s translation of Strabo is eminently readable, sometimes lively, and better in some places than Roller’s; but neither Pothecary nor Roller surpasses the clarity and naturalness attained by Horace Leonard Jones in the Loeb Classical Library edition, completed in 1930. Pothecary also has certain peculiar locutions, including one ‘mega-issue’ (to borrow the oddity quoted above) that creates a recurring distraction. In scores of passages Strabo uses the Greek geographical term oikoumenê to refer to the landmass formed by Europe, Asia and Africa; nearly every English translator renders the term ‘inhabited world’. Pothecary has opted for ‘lived-in’ rather than ‘inhabited’. Since ‘lived-in’ implies deterioration with age, a reader of this Geographica might well imagine a world that is wearing out from overuse – increasingly accurate, perhaps, but not what Strabo intended.

The principal challenge for any translator of Strabo is the toponyms and ethnonyms that make up the tissue of his text. Some have easy English equivalents – Nile for Neilus, Egypt for Aegyptus – while others present stickier problems, especially those that cannot be securely identified with a modern place. Pothecary includes a running set of equivalences, telling us, for example, that Strabo’s Euenus river is the modern Phidaris (in western Greece) or that the Phoenician city of Marathus, already in ruins in Strabo’s time, lies in modern Syria and is called Amrit. A few of these tags are opaque; Meroë, for instance, a city on the upper Nile, is here explained as ‘region of Bagrawiya (Sud.)’, which will only make sense to those familiar with modern Sudan. A broader concern though is the book’s constant one-to-one mapping of our world onto the ‘outdated’ world described by Strabo. By placing these tags next to the text, rather than in footnotes or (as Roller and Radt did) in a separate volume, Pothecary makes the reading experience much more like an exercise in cartography than Strabo, who aimed to interest ‘the philosopher’, might have preferred. Her set of equivalences clearly results from long and intensive research, but most of the tags will only be recognisable, never mind meaningful, to those consulting an atlas as they read.

These cartographic identifiers are one of several elements found in the margins of this edition, in a layout that crowds Strabo’s text into less than half the page width. In an ill-conceived effort to keep the reader informed on multiple levels at every turn, Pothecary has created three separate columns of marginal notes and used two of the three for multiple purposes. Mixed in with the tags to the right of the text are explanations of historical references or terms, some of them otiose (‘oracle, instruction from the gods’). Further to the right are the book, chapter and section citations denoting one’s place in the text. To the left is a second indexing scheme, based on the so-called Casaubon numbers imposed by a 16th-century editor. But mingled with these are other notes telling us the dates of figures mentioned by Strabo, explaining terms and giving additional cartographic tags in places where the righthand margin has become too crowded. Add to this melange a set of footnotes on nearly every page, cross-referencing other parts of the work, and information oppression sets in very quickly. In an effort to accommodate all four non-text columns, the book’s designer has resorted to a font size that, for readers whose eyes are no longer sharp, may induce mild feelings of panic.

The same small font has been used for the indices, inexplicably since these pages offered plenty of room. Since many who consult Strabo’s work will be using it as a reference, to look up a particular topic or place, the difficulties these indices present do a grave disservice to the entire volume. Here again Pothecary has made inexplicable choices, supplying Casaubon citations instead of page numbers to guide the reader to a point in the text. To find Strabo’s sole mention of Boeoti (a town in the Peloponnese), we are directed to ‘360C, 10-16’ rather than to page 427. After a while one learns how to find such a place by consulting the book’s outer margins, but the instinct to look instead at the bottom corners is hard to overcome.

Pothecary is clearly eager for us to immerse ourselves in Strabo as fully as she is immersed. At points along the way in the text she inserts tinted boxes with the heading ‘Remember’, reminding us of the various aids to comprehension she has devised as well as directing us back to her prefatory ‘Special Features of this Translation’ and ‘A User’s Guide’. Her multiple levels of explication may indeed be suitable ‘for the modern world’, a world that is learning to cope with barrages of data arriving constantly from numerous sources. But one need not be a Luddite to feel that, in this noisy edition of Strabo, overloaded even for a kolossourgia, modernity has got out of hand.