Strabo and the shape of his Historika Hypomnemata

Strabo’s best known work is his Geography in 17 books, and 19th century critics, who despaired of his amateurism in the areas of maths and astronomy, pointed out that even in the Geography, his most obvious strengths seem to lie rather in the field of history. In her sympathetic study of Strabo, Katherine Clarke has explored the overlap between historical and geographical thinking, with a strong emphasis on the construction of the concepts of space and time. Her book is a serious attempt to evaluate what Strabo understood by geography within his Augustan context, and how he saw it in relation to history. The close relationship between geography and history had its immediate antecedents in the work of Polybius and other Hellenistic authors. Strabo emerges as an author who had a keen sense of the need for his Geography to expose present physical realities, without excluding what was, in his view, relevant discussion of the past (Strabo 6.1.2=C253). Scientific aspects of geography were not central to his approach, and were quickly surveyed in the introductory books (1 & 2). The overall product can be labelled as cultural geography, and its concerns, including his obsessive interest in Homer, can be construed as an outcome of his traditional Hellenistic education. His focus on urbanisation resonates better with modern notions of a geographical theme. He views other cultures through Hellenised eyes, and favours centres which foster Greek culture. Clarke’s attention is largely focused on the extant Geography, but Strabo started with an earlier historical work, which owed conspicuous debts to Polybius, including conceptualising the work as a continuation of his famous predecessor. Here the aim is to examine the fragments of the earlier work, and try to isolate some prominent characteristics, in so far as this is possible. Limitations include the small number of surviving citations from the work, and the motives of the restricted number of authors employing it. Strabo’s historical work appears most frequently in Josephus, generally in the Antiquities, but these references do not always clarify the shape of the original. Some investigation of how and why Josephus cites Strabo may help to comprehend this.