Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) - Volume 3.djvu/930

Rh 918 STRABO. except in those passages where the text has been corrupted ; it is appropriate to the matter, simple and without affectation. It is objected to Strabo that he has undervalued Herodotus, and puts him on the same footing as Ctesias. The work of Herodotus was perhaps hardly appreciated, as it deserved to be, by any writer of antiquity ; and it is a well grounded complaint against Strabo that he could not or did not choose to discriminate between the stories which Herodotus tells simply as stories which he heard, and that which is the result of the personal observation of Herodotus. There are many parts of the geography of Strabo, particularly his de- scription of Greece, for which he could have derived excellent materials from Herodotus. Strabo has maintained the notion, which had prevailed from the time of Alexander the Great, that the Caspian sea was connected with the northern ocean. Hero- dotus states it to be a lake, without expressing any doubt on the matter ; but how he got this inform- ation, it is impossible to conjecture. Strabo did not consider such a fable worth mentioning. We might reasonably expect him to give some evidence, such as he had, of its supposed connection with the northern ocean. He rejects the evidence of Pytheas of Marseille, as to the northern regions of Europe, and treats him as no better than a liar, a circumstance in some measure due to Strabo's attachment to his own system ; but an unprejudiced critic should have discovered truth even when it is mixed with fable. Strabo's authorities are nearly exclusively Greek. He had a contempt for the Roman writers generally ; and certainly simply as geographers there was not one among them who could be called by that name. But the campaigns of the Romans and their historical writings and memoirs would have furnished him with many valuable geographical facts both for his Asiatic and European Geography. He made some use of Caesar's writings for his description of Gallia, the Alps, and Britain, and he used other materials also, as we see from his brief notice of the voyage of Publius Crassus to the Cassiterides (p. 176). But with this exception, and the writings of Asinius Pollio, Fabius Fictor, and an anonymous chorogra- pher, he drew little from Roman sources. The conjecture thai he was imperfectly acquainted with the Latin language, will not sufficiently account for this, even if we suppose that he did not learn it till he visited Rome ; for he might easily have learned Latin enough during his residence in Italy to read a Roman author, and if he did choose to do that, he could have found plenty of Greeks and Romans to help him. That he could not have wanted the means of procuring information, we may safely assume, for Strabo could not have tra- velled so much if he were a poor man. He cer- tainly did not take pains to make the most of the Roman materials which he might have found in Rome. The imperfect descriptions in many parts of Strabo's work are probably to be attributed more to system than to want of information. He purposely omitted many things and many places as not being comprehended within his notion of what would be useful for the class of persons for whom he wrote. It was probably also his object to bring his work within a certain compass, so as not to damage its circulation by its magnitude, for as books were to be copied, and as a man wrote in order to have STRABO. readers, an object which Strabo clearly admits, the reduction of works within reasonable limits was at that time, even more than now, necessary, in order to ensure their circulation. The use that Strabo has made of Homer, is another objection to his work. Like many other Greeks, Strabo viewed the old national poet as the representative of all knowledge ; and considered with respect to his own time, the Homeric poems are the representation of all that was then known, at least of history and geography. But the way in which Strabo, particularly in his first book, labours to give a meaning to what the poet has said, is highly uncritical. That which Homer darkly knew or half guessed, has no value except as an index of the state of geographical knowledge at that time, and was entirely useless in the age of Strabo. Though the Homeric poems show a great acquaint- ance with the topography of Greece and the islands of the Archipelago, they could not with any pro- priety be made the basis of a geographical descrip- tion of those parts, as Strabo has made them ; and there were many materials, though scattered and incomplete, which Strabo should have used in preference to the Homeric poems, and which he either did not look for or purposely neglected. Thus his description sometimes becomes rather a commentary on Homer than an independent de- scription, based on the actual state of knowledge. In fact he did not conceive his object with that clearness, which is necessary to give to a work a distinctive character ; and though his work is doubt- less much more entertaining than that of Eratos- thenes was, and more nearly approaches to the cha- racter of a true geographical system than the meagre determinations of Ptolemaeus, it does not fulfil all the conditions of a general systematic geography. It is another defect in Strabo's work that the science of astronomy was not properly applied by him. The determination of the earth's figure, and the determination of position by the measures of latitude and longitude are the essential foundations of geographical description. The physical descrip- tion of the earth's surface, which is the proper object of geography, requires the determination of position, in order to give it precision. Though Strabo had some mathematical and astronomical knowledge, he undervalued these sciences as helps to geography, and he did not consider the exact division of the earth into climates, in the sense in which Hipparchus used the term, and the state- ment of the latitudes and longitudes of places, which in many cases were pretty well determined, as essential to his geographical description. He is also frequently very incomplete and unsatisfactory in his notice of the physical character and the natural phaenomena of the countries which he describes, which defects and others in his work are probably in a great measure due to the circumstance that the notion of a geographical description was by no means well settled then ; and indeed the same remark applies in some degree to the works of the present day. The true medium between a pure description of the earth's surface as a natural phaenoraenon and the earth's surface as the scene of human activity, both past and present, caimot be determined by any general rule, but must be left to the tact and judgment of a writer who is thproughly master of his matter, and who sees by a kind of intuition what must be admitted within his work and what may be properly omitted.