3 - Homer, the ideal historian: Strabo's Geography

Summary

One of the longest and most detailed ancient discussions of Homer's historical accuracy is found in the first book of Strabo of Amasia's Geography. The work, written in seventeen books around the beginning of the common era, is ostensibly a comprehensive description of the inhabited world. But Homer, somewhat surprisingly, casts a long shadow over the text; Strabo quotes Homer over seven hundred times, and the books on Greece (7–10) and the Troad (13) read for long stretches like a Homeric geographical commentary, featuring extensive textual exegeses of his poetry and often dispensing with any attempt to describe current or even post-Homeric conditions. In these parts of his work, Strabo accepts Homer's fundamental accuracy without question and analyzes individual lines, phrases, and words of the poet down to the last detail for any information they might yield about the state of the world in heroic times. In tackling such problems, Strabo draws upon an impressive arsenal of interpretive techniques that speaks to his considerable familiarity with the intricacies of Homeric scholarship, as does the frequency with which he engages in spirited polemic with his Hellenistic predecessors.

The interest that Strabo shows in Homer – in identifying Homeric cities, regions, or peoples with their modern counterparts, making sense of the poet's topographical descriptions, or locating controversial sites (e.g., Pylos, Troy, and Ithaca) – is, strictly speaking, nothing new; it is already in evidence among the early historical writers such as Hecataeus and Pherecydes and continues in Herodotus, Hellanicus, and Thucydides.