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Episode 351: 'Geography' by Strabo
00:36:32
John J. Miller is joined by Sarah Pothecary to discuss 'Geography' by Strabo.
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- [00:00]
Sarah Pothecary
FOREIGN.
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John J. Miller
Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about Geography by Strabo. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review, and you're listening to a production of National Review. This episode is sponsored by St. John's College, and I'll tell you more about that in just a few minutes. Our guest is Sarah Pothecary. She's the translator of a brand new edition of Strabo's Geography, recently published by Princeton University Press. She's an independent scholar educated at the University of Oxford and the University of Toronto, and she's co editor of Strabo's Cultural Geography. She joins us by zoom as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Sarah, welcome to the Great Books Podcast.
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Sarah Pothecary
Thank you for inviting me.
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John J. Miller
Why is Geography by Strabo a great book?
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Sarah Pothecary
So Strabo's geography is a great book because it describes the whole world. So that's a really broad canvas, and it leads to a work of rich diversity, reflecting the world's story, past and its lively present, with the added twist that the geography was written 2000 years ago in the early days of the Roman Empire. And that relationship between Strabo's 1st century present and our 21st century present is something that I think gives the work an extra dimension for modern readers. I should actually sort of start by saying that when Strabo describes the world, you know, what actually does he mean? What word does he use? He's writing in ancient Greek and the word he uses for world is just two letters long. Ge. It's the root of our word, geography, obviously, also geopolitics, geophysics, geomagnetic, actually the name of the root of the name. George and indirectly the state of Georgia. But it is an ambiguous word because it can mean the spherical word in its entirety, or it can mean the relatively small part of the earth's surface with which the Greeks and Romans were familiar and which they called the lived in world, or sometimes just the world for short.
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John J. Miller
We're going to talk about all of that, the content of this big book, who was the author, the man behind it, what it's like to translate in ancient Greek text and bring it into our modern language. Sarah though, let's just start with this title. You've already introduced it a little bit for us. Geographica, I guess, is the Greek version of it. We call it Geography. But break that down for us a little bit further. What does it mean? And what does Strabo mean by Geographica?
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Sarah Pothecary
So literally, in The Greek, it means describing the world or a description of the world. And that is what Strabo does. But as I say, it's. It's ambiguous, the world, and it can mean the spherical Earth. And Strabo does spend some time describing that, which sometimes surprises people, because there's a bit of a sort of urban myth out there that in Strabo's day, the ancients thought the world was flat. That's wrong. They had. They had known that the world was spherical for hundreds of years. They hadn't actually sailed around the world, but they. They knew it. And so the question is, you know, how did they know it? And Strobo's geography explains that for us. If you go out at night and look up at the night sky, assuming you're fortunate enough to live somewhere without light pollution, you feel as if you're looking at the inside of a dark sphere which is spangled with stars which rotate around you as the night goes on. The Greeks thought that the night sky, whole sky, in fact the cosmos, as they called it, not only appeared to be the inside of a sphere, but actually was the inside of a sphere. They then reasoned that the Earth was at the center of this celestial sphere and therefore must itself be spherical. So it's a case of them being both right and wrong. They were wrong about the Earth being at the center of a celestial sphere, but they were right about it being spherical, or roughly spherical. I mean, we now say it's a little bit squished on top, but spherical as opposed to flat.
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John J. Miller
This was one of the surprises for me as a reader. I just assumed that the Greeks thought the world was flat. Why do we have this common misconception about the ancient world and what the people in it knew?
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Sarah Pothecary
I wish I could answer that question. Perhaps one of the answers. I've had teachers telling me that I'm wrong. No, no, no. The ancients thought that the world was flat. I think it's all part of this idea that we are more bright and more intelligent than anybody else in the past. And so therefore, people in the past must have had these wrong ideas. And when we sort of start from that preconception and it's wrong. And one of the reasons why we should read the ancient classics, because it's to sort of correct that misconception.
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John J. Miller
There are a lot of surprises in this book, and we'll get to a few in a moment. I do want to begin with the opening chapter of Strabo's Geography, because this is where he justifies his topic and as you're introducing it in your translation, you say that he is, quote, strangely inarticulate when it comes to explaining why others should find it valuable, unquote. And I suppose this is an occasional occupational hazard for enthusiasts, for fans, Right? But what is. What does he say about his topic? And what should he have said?
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Sarah Pothecary
Well, he tries to make a case for it being useful, a useful subject, practical and therefore worth people studying, and particularly useful for leaders. And the word he uses for leaders, hegemonies, it's the same as our word hegemony. He basically means Roman emperors. So he's trying to make a case for being useful at the highest levels. I don't think he does that very well. He draws some very bizarre examples. He talks about how it would have helped the Persians when they were invading Greece. He's Talking about the 5th century now, Way before his time, if they had known about geography. Because he refers to a particular event where the Persians are trying to sail down a narrow strait between the island of Boeotia and the mainland Greece. And they thought they were going down a dead end and they panicked and they. They killed the Boeotian, who they were using as their pilot. I'm not sure it really shows you that much. I mean, the pilot was right. He was telling them they could go down this narrow strait, which was true. So he knew what he was talking about and he actually ended up getting killed. So he was the one who knew about geography and it didn't work out well for him. And there are a few more examples like that, which I don't find very convincing. I think he would have done better just to concentrate on the interest, the variety, the need to get out of your immediate vicinity and understand the wider world and how varied that world was. I think that was his true reason, to be honest, given. Given what he writes about and what he spends most of the book writing about. But he somehow feels obliged that he's got to make this not very watertight case.
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John J. Miller
He also calls in this opening section, he calls Homer the first geographer. And I know the ancient Greeks loved their Homer, but why does he do that? Why does he put Homer at the start or even at the center of things?
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Sarah Pothecary
I think it's because Homer does talk about lots of places. You know, he talks about Egypt and he talks about Phoenicia, and he talks about. And lots of names that the Greeks didn't understand what they might mean. We would today say they were just made up names. But the Greeks didn't think that they Thought they must refer to somebody. And he refers to places like Pylos, like. And the Greeks wanted to know where Pylos was in mainland Greece because things had changed by, by their days. Homer is like 800 years before Strabo. So I think that Homer had given the Greeks a realization that the world used to be different than it is. It had different people or different people with different names, nations with different names, towns with different names. And there was a difference between how the world is now. And when I say now, I mean in Strabo's day. So in that sense, Homer was the first geographer. I mean, Strabo probably overstates the case and particularly in his description of mainland Greece. It's very difficult for modern readers to who don't know their Homer to read because that's what he is basically doing. He's basically trying to explain where all the places are that Homer mentions. That's very important if you're an aficionado of Homer and not so important and not so relevant if you don't know much about Homer.
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John J. Miller
As we move then from this first chapter to the second chapter, and this is how you are organizing the book in your translation with several chapters. As we move into chapter two, this is where it really gets interesting in my view. Where for example, Strabo says, by the way, the earth is round, he also introduces this idea of the lived in world. That's a quote, that's how you translate the lived in world. What does that, what does he mean by the lived in world?
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Sarah Pothecary
So it sometimes has been traditionally translated as the inhabited world. I use the lived in world well for reasons that I hope will become obvious. Let's talk about what is actually involved in the lived in world, what it actually covers, what land area it covers in modern day terms because I think it's, it's somewhat bigger than modern readers might be given to understand. So it stretches eastwards from Iberia, which is modern day Spain and Portugal, as far actually as modern day Bangladesh. There are for Strabo no people living beyond what we call Bangladesh. So no Myanmar, no Thailand, no China for the most part, no Japan. And then northwards it goes as far as Britain and Ireland and then northern Germany, Poland, Ukraine, a bit of Russia between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, perhaps a tiny bit of China lying along the Himalayas. Further north in these areas, Straba believes that the climate is so freezing cold, but habitation is impossible. And that is a wrong belief, of course, but it's one that's so entrenched in Strabo's mindset, that he calls liars and cheats those who claim that there are people living in these more northerly regions. And we might go back to that later. But as concerns the southwards extension of the lived in world, it goes south, as we would say Western Sahara, Mauritania, southern Algeria, Northern Niger, Northern Chad, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia. And anywhere south of that is simply considered too hot for habitation. But I should just clarify. This lived in world within those parameters that I've just described is confined, according to Strabo, to one half of the Northern hemisphere. So Strabo is open to the idea of people living in the other half of the Northern hemisphere. And I can quote from Strabo here. It is possible, he says, that there are two or more lived in worlds within the same temperate zone, especially in the vicinity of the Athens parallel, where it is drawn through the Atlantic Ocean. Now, by Athens parallel, his word parallel means what we would call a line of latitude. And the line of latitude through the city of Athens in Greece is about 38 degrees north. And basically that does take you slap bang through the middle of the modern day United States of America. But while Strabo is open to the possibility of people living in what we now call North America, he thinks that there could never be any communication between these two worlds because nobody would ever be able to cross the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. And as regards the Southern hemisphere, again, there may be people living there, he says, but to meet them you'd have to go across the equator. And Strabo thinks it's impossible for man to do that. Again, he's wrong. But he's trying to make sense of the world around him, doesn't always get it right. Following his sometimes wacky thought processes is one of the joys I think, of reading Strabo.
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John J. Miller
So he gives us a tour of this world. Then he describes these places, the physical terrain of them, what you might associate with the word geography, our modern word geography. But it's also an anthropological account. It's the world and the people in it. He talks about who are the folks in these places. Right?
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Sarah Pothecary
That is his main interest. And that is in some ways why I've chosen the translation lived in world rather than inhabited world. Because it's almost as if the fact that the world is lived in is what makes it interesting. So especially like going north or south, he thinks there may be more land to the north or south of the lived in world. But he thinks there's Nobody living in it. And it's almost as if there's nobody living in it and there's nobody there thought to perceive it. It's not worth knowing about. And if we look at his detailed description of the lived in world which constitutes most of his book, yes, he is really interested in all the people, all the nation, all their habits, all their customs, all their histories in a way that I think is very. That resonates with the globalized world of today.
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John J. Miller
It's even occasionally amusing or often amusing. When he gets to Britain, for example, he doesn't say a lot about Britain. He doesn't know a lot about Britain. But this is after Caesar's invasion. The Romans had been there, they'd had some experience with it. He writes about Britain. He says the men are tall and gangly, they live in forests. Then he takes us to Ireland where there is less familiarity, even less familiar community. Says those people are more savage, they're cannibals, they're sexually unrestrained. These are amusing descriptions. In certain ways they are.
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Sarah Pothecary
I mean, Britain and Ireland are two slightly separate situations. Strabo had not been to Britain, but the Brits that you're talking about, the tall and gangly ones he had seen in Rome because there was an ongoing trade with, between Britain and Rome and that included a trade in slaves. So I think that's quite interesting for those who study the, you know, the awful 17th and 18th century slave trade to reflect that the Brits themselves were enslaved at times, but they were apparently useless as slaves. And that's where he, Strabo describes them as tall and gangly, crippled and deformed in various parts of their body. So he has seen those, but he has seen nothing from Ireland. He admits that the tales that he tell, he tells about them are just hearsay, but, you know, they're too good to miss. They're too good to leave out, I think.
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John J. Miller
How did he gather his information then? Is it rumors? Is it documents? Is it eyewitness travel? How does he learn about the lived in world and then report it to us?
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Sarah Pothecary
Okay, so all of the above, but primarily he gathered his information from written works, of which there were a huge quantity in the library. And he spent a lot of time in Alexandria, which was the library, which had a lot of books, what we, what we would call books, but at the time were papyrus rolls. And he's extraordinarily well read, particularly if you read the first two books of Strabo, the first two chapters in my divisions, he mentions earlier writers all the time. In a way which is a little bit confus for modern readers because these are not names that we're familiar with. But as well as his written sources, he had traveled to some extent as well, probably more than most people would think that somebody of that era would have traveled. He tells us that he had traveled as far east. Actually, he says as far east as Armenia. He means ancient Armenia, not modern Armenia. And he basically means where the river Euphrates runs through Turkey. He'd been that far east and he'd been as far west as the city of Populonium, now known as Populonia, on the west coast of Italy. And he had traveled up the Nile as far south as Syene, which is modern day, as one. And he had also traveled extensively in what he calls the Asian peninsula and what we would call Turkey. And I think some of the most interesting passages are those concerning his personal experiences in, in what we now call Turkey.
- [18:15]
John J. Miller
You're listening to the Great Books Podcast, a production of A National Review. And I'd like to tell you about our sponsor, which is St. John's College, the nation's great books college, where students explore 3,000 years of human thought across multiple disciplines in just four years or two. For graduate students on campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland, encount history's most influential works from the Western canon or the Eastern canon. In this vibrant community of learning, where students grapple together with fundamental questions that confront us all as human beings. Learn more about St. John's undergraduate and graduate programs, including low residency graduate options at sjc. Edu. That's SJC for St. Johnscollege. Eduardo, Sarah, give us an example of what Strabo tells us about these places. He has stories, he has anecdotes. Do you have a favorite one?
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Sarah Pothecary
Well, from the anecdotes that concern his sort of personal experiences. Well, I find those all. I find those all quite fascinating, actually. But an example I can give you is his visit to a place called Hierapolis, which is nowadays called Pamukkale. It's in. In Turkey, modern day Turkey, where there was a cave sacred to the God of the underworld. So that cave, in fact this type of cave, because there were many, was called a plutonium. That's nothing to do with the radioactive element, but rather the God of the underworld was called Pluto. So therefore a cave sacred to him was called a plutonium. And the cave was full of noxious gas which we would identify today as carbon dioxide. So I'm going to read you what he tells us about this site, he's going to refer to eunuchs, by which he means the priests at the plutonium. They were supposed to have immunity to these noxious gases, but as we shall see, Strabo is skeptical. So Hierapolis has hot springs and plutonium, both of which have amazing phenomena associated with them. The water from the springs quickly solidifies into stone, so people channel it through trenches to create seamless walls. The plutonium is an opening beneath a small overhang of the mountain. Above it is large enough to admit a man and extremely deep. In front of it there's a four angled wooden guardrail, some half cubit in circumference. This is full of a mist so dense and dark that one can scarcely see the floor. Those in the vicinity who approach the guardrail find the air harmless, devoid of mist, at least in windless conditions. When the mist stays within the enclosed area, however, any living creature who goes past the rail meets instant death. For example, bulls are driven in collapse and are pulled out as corpses. I dispatched some sparrows and they immediately suffocated and dropped down dead. The eunuchs, called the galley, can go past the rail without suffering ill effects. So they approach the mouth, stoop down and go in for as long as they can hold their breath. I saw that they had a look on their faces as if they were choking. So that's the reading, and I love it because it shows Freibo as skeptical about the priest's supposed immunity from the Nox gases. He thinks they simply hold their breath, although he does speculate that maybe eunuchs can hold their breath longer than other people. And I also like the slightly gruesome delight in the dying bulls and sparrows. I think that Strabo is probably remembering something from his school days. He went to a secondary school not far away in a city called Nyse Sultanhisa, modern day Turkey. He describes a similar plutonium near Nisa and specifically tells us that the young men from the local school took part in the proceedings, which probably includes himself. And it sounds as if it's something that the young men really looked forward to. He tells us they strip themselves down, anoint themselves with oil, and then around about noon drive the bull in. So that is Strabo's description of Hierapolis. You can visit it today. I haven't been there. Would love to go. The cave of which Drabo talks was actually rediscovered in the 19. It had been blocked up with stones, probably by Christians, a few hundred years after Strabo had seen it. Because it had lost its popularity because it was a pagan site.
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John J. Miller
A lot of the fun of this book are the stories and anecdotes and incidences like that. Your index of Strabo's geography is a lot of fun to go through. Just under a. We have Atlantis, atomic theory of all things, avalanche, survival and more. I did see an entry for crucifixion which was surprising. Strabo did live in the time of Jesus. He was born in the 60s BC, lived to about 24 AD, so, so older than Jesus. Born before, died before, but did overlap. There's no reference to Jesus in this book, but there is a reference to crucifixion. Several references to crucifixion. The Celts did it. He describes a writer in Turkey who's crucified then. He has a bit about a group of people called the Cantabrians. He says, as for the witlessness of the Cantabrians, this too is reported that some, when taken captive and nailed to crosses, nevertheless sang songs of victory, unquote. Which sounded kind of Christian to me, but help me understand this. The role of crucifixion in this world. Is he detecting any kind of Christian Christianity at all?
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Sarah Pothecary
I don't think so. But the Cantabrians who were crucified, they would have been crucified by the Romans. So that's another example of Roman crucifixion, you know, as in the chase, as in the case of Jesus Christ. It's interesting that Strabo doesn't think that it's, you know, he doesn't think it's a particularly uncivilized form of behavior to crucify people. He thinks it's, it's, it's quite normal. I mean, he has lots of other stories about the Cantabrians and how brave they are. Although he talks about their witlessness in that particular instance, he's often quite interested in how, in how bold and fearless they are. The Cantabrians had actually fought for a long time against the Romans and the Romans quite respected their Cantabrians attempt to fight off the Romans. And Frebo tells stories about what they did when they were taken captive. He tells a story of Cantabrian mothers killing their children before they could be taken captive. Particular vignette. Cantabrian family is captured and tied up by the Romans, except for the four year old son who on his own father's instructions grabs hold of an iron tool and kills them all. Better that than to live in slavery. Roman war against The Cantabrians is justified on the grounds that they are uncivilized. One of the reasons he thinks that they're uncivilized, one of the reasons he gives is that women have quite a lot of independence. They can, Strabo tells us, inherit property. They receive a dowry from their husbands upon marriage rather than the other way around. And women marry off their brothers to suitable wives, again, rather than sisters being married off to suitable husbands. Strabo is horrified, saying this amounts to a. And he uses the word gynecocracy, which is rule by women. And that, he says, is not at all civilized. So these are the people who also, you know, sing when they're crucified by the Romans on the. On the cross. And I think Strabo gives a pretty brilliant depiction of their, of their bravery, like, like the Celts in the neighboring France and regions. It wasn't through lack of bravery that they lost out to the Romans.
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John J. Miller
Your new edition of Strabo's Geography is recently published by Princeton University Press. Describe for us what's in it. It's a big book. I'll say It's. It's oversized. It's also more than 1100 pages long. I'm going to guess that's pretty long for an ancient source. But tell us what is in this edition and why did you want to translate this big work?
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Sarah Pothecary
Let's. Let's start with why did I want to translate it. I first came across it when I went back to university to do a PhD as a mature student, and I was casting around, looking for something to get interested in. And I was doing a course about Alexander the Great, and we had to read a passage in which Alexander the Great is campaigning in what we would now call Turkmenistan, you know, Afghanistan. And he doesn't really know where he is. There is confusion as to whether the large body of water west of him is the Black Sea or the Caspian Sea. Now, it was the latter, of course, it was the Caspian Sea. But some writers about Alexander claimed that it was the Black Sea. And that got me thinking about how anyone in antiquity knew where they were on the earth's surface. And that passage that we had had to read, it came from Strabo. So that got me into Strabo, and I found it full of fascinating information. I was only surprised that he isn't part of the sort of main curriculum in classics departments. He. He tends to, you know, lose out to more familiar Herodotus or Thucydides or, you know, philosophers like, like Plato. And I think That's a loss. And I thought that one of the reasons why that is the case is that there wasn't really a. A translation that helped you find a way, your way around the world that Strabo describes. Because it is very difficult. Strabo uses the names that he was familiar with, ancient names which are different from the names that we use nowadays. And I think modern readers need help. I mean, for instance, if Strabo tells us that Hyrcania is a wonderfully fertile place and produces wine and figs and has bees that produce masses of honey, I think it helps to know that Hyrcania is what we would now call northern Iran or a little bit of Turmenistan, then it makes it all much more relevant and interesting. So not only did I translate it, but I wanted to make it clear by putting notes in the margins as to where the people in the places that Strabo talks about, where they are in the modern world.
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John J. Miller
What are the challenges of translating a work like this? I imagine just fundamentally hard to translate ancient Greek. But you're probably dealing with questions about how do I make this passage as literally accurate as Strabo wrote it, but also making it make sense to a modern reader and so on. What are the challenges you face as a translator when you're trying to bring this work into the modern world?
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Sarah Pothecary
In some ways, I find the ancient Greek that Strabo wrote is easier to put into modern English than some of the earlier works from 5th century Greece. The language had got a little bit more loose and a little bit more fluent. I mean, if you're a pure stylist, it's not as good. And that is probably one reason why Zevo is not read as widely as he should be, because his style is not perfect. But I don't think our style is perfect today either. And that's why it was possible to sort of translate it into relatively, sort of into the vernacular relatively easily. The particular problems are, I think that he somehow assumes that you're following along all the time on a map or something like that, yet he didn't actually produce a map map. If he did, it didn't come down to us. All those. If you Google Strabo's lived in world or Strabo's world, you'll come up with lots of maps on the Internet. But they were all drawn in the 18th or 19th century. Perhaps it was just a case of, in Strabo's day, people use their minds a bit more than they do now. They use their memories they had mental images that they. They used. And I think that was the case with Strabo as. As well. And then there's some problems. Like, for instance, he uses a different unit of measurement, of course, than we use. So whereas we would use the mile or the kilometer, he uses the staid. How long was the stayed? A clue is provided by the actual Greek and Latin name. The Greek name is stadion, and the Roman equivalent of that is stadium. And there's your clue right there. It's the length of a running track. So how long was the length of a running track? It was 600ft or so. There's about eight stades to the Roman mile, which basically means there's just under nine to our modern mile. I didn't do a conversion of all the figures or the distances given to us in the geography, but you can work it out yourself. I included a page at the beginning of the translation where I show how to convert from stades to miles. Stades tend to come in quite large numbers because the unit they're using is relatively small.
- [32:56]
John J. Miller
This is a big book. More than 1100 pages. Did you have any idea what you were getting yourself into when you started and how long did it take to produce this new edition?
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Sarah Pothecary
No, I didn't have any idea what I was letting myself in for when. When I started. Probably just as well. My husband, who's a businessman and management consultant, kept saying to me, you've got to sit down and figure out how many lines you do per day and how many days it's going to take you. And, you know, I never did that, and I'm glad I didn't, because I probably have figured out how long it was going to take me, and I'd probably have decided it wasn't. It wasn't worth it, because it did. It was 20 years ago that I started on this project, and it took longer than it might normally do because I wanted to put modern place names in. I wanted to make it obvious what the modern places were, and I wanted to do that by putting notes in the margins. I couldn't believe that nobody had done that before because it makes Strabo reading Strabo so much easier. But having done it, I realize why nobody else had done it before with Strabo, because it does add a lot of time to the process, and it's a typesetting nightmare for the publishers. And I have to express my gratitude to my publishers for indulging my whim and taking the time and effort that this required.
- [34:23]
John J. Miller
Well, we should all express Our gratitude to you because this is an amazing addition. It really makes Strabo go down easy easily. It's a handsome book. It's easy to read and understand. It's a big book, but you can dip into it. The index is really good. Sarah, just one final question. I really enjoyed going through this book and learning from it, but what's the case for reading it now? Is it just a historical curiosity, a kind of artifact from the ancient world, or is there a reason to study it and learn from it today?
- [34:56]
Sarah Pothecary
Well, that's a good question, of course, because our knowledge of geography now is much greater than Strabo's was, so we're not really reading it to learn about the world. I think that it gives you a very good example of how scientific theories arise and how human thought processes work. Strabo is wrong about so many things, but right about so many things. And often it's a case of he works on the wrong premise but comes up with the right conclusion or works on the right premise and comes up with the wrong conclusion. And it all that makes very interesting reading for modern scholars. And it made me question a lot of what we think about. We don't. We don't have so much uncertainty about the world, but about outer space or the universe or something like that. It's more the equivalent. Strabo talking about the world was more the equivalent of us talking about the universe and how big it is and are we ever going to get to the other parts of it and so on.
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John J. Miller
Sarah Apothecary, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about Strabo's geography.
- [36:10]
Sarah Pothecary
Thank you.
- [36:11]
John J. Miller
You've just listened to the Great Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Send me your ideas for future episod. Reach me through my website@heymiller.com on Twitter. My handle is heymiller last all special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Great Books Podcast.