Strabo’s Geographica

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Strabo’s Geographica. Written almost exactly two thousand years ago by a Greek scholar living in Rome, the Geographica is an ambitious attempt to describe the entire world known to the Romans and Greeks at that time. Strabo seems to have based his book on accounts of distant lands given to him by contemporary travellers and imperial administrators, and on earlier works of scholarship by other Greek writers. One of the earliest systematic works of geography, Strabo’s book offers a revealing insight into the state of ancient scholarship, and remained influential for many centuries after the author’s death.

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Guests

• Paul Cartledge 22 episodes
  AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge
• Maria Pretzler No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Swansea University
• Benet Salway No other episodes
  Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at UCL

Reading list

• Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World
  Katherine Clarke (Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Strabo of Amasia: A Greek Man of Letters in Augustan Rome
  Daniela Dueck (Routledge, 2000)
• Geography in Classical Antiquity
  Daniela Dueck (Cambridge University Press, 2012)
• Strabo's Cultural Geography: The Making of a Kolossourgia
  D. Dueck, H. Lindsay & S. Pothecary (Cambridge University Press, 2005)
• Eratosthenes' Geography
  Eratosthenes (trans. Duane W. Roller) (Princeton University Press, 2010)
• Circumference: Eratosthenes and the Ancient Quest to Measure the Globe
  Nicholas Nicastro (St Martin's Press, 2008)
• Space, Geography and Politics in the Early Roman Empire
  C. Nicolet (University of Michigan Press, 1991)
• Pausanias: Travel Writing in Ancient Greece
  Maria Pretzler (Duckworth, 2007)
• The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration and Fiction
  J. S. Romm (Princeton University Press, 1992)
• The Geography of Strabo: An English Translation, with Introduction and Notes
  Strabo (trans. Duane W. Roller) (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
• Geography
  Strabo (trans. H. L. Jones) (Loeb Classical Library, 8 vols, Harvard University Press, 1917-1930)
• Ancient Perspectives: Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome
  Richard J. A. Talbert (ed.) (Chicago University Press, 2012)

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Programme ID: b03zr11t

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03zr11t

Auto-category: 910 (Geography and travel)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, one of the earliest known examples of a foreigner complaining about the British weather can be found in a book written 2000 years ago by the Greek scholar Strabo.