mail: Bill Thayer

Help

Up

Home

Strabo: The Geography

The Author, the Manuscripts

As with most ancient authors, not that much is known of Strabo, and the Loeb edition's introductory material, by the translator Horace Leonard Jones, is about as good as one can get. The Loeb edition also provides a thorough bibliography, including a very summary discussion of the principal manuscripts of the Geography: that too will eventually find its way onsite, except for some few addenda made by the Loeb editors in the later reprintings and therefore still under copyright. Further good information, especially on editions and translations, may be found on Sarah Pothecary's site.

The Text of Strabo on LacusCurtius

The entire work is online in English translation. I don't plan to enter the original Greek text: those, now few, who read Greek will very likely have access to TLG.

As almost always, I retyped the text rather than scanning it: not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

I ran a first check immediately after entering each book; then I proofread the text word by word, a check which is meant to be final. In the little table of contents below, the sections are therefore shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; red backgrounds would mean that they still needed that final proofreading. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme. Should you spot an error, however . . . please do report it.

Books 6‑14 of the Geography have also been online for some time at Perseus, in both the original Greek and an English translation.

Edition Used

Loeb Classical Library, 8 volumes, Greek texts with fa­cing English translation by H. L. Jones: Harvard University Press, 1917 thru 1932. The text is in the public domain: that of the earlier volumes because the copyright has lapsed; that of the later volumes, pursuant to the 1978 revision of the U. S. Copyright Code, because the copyrights expired and were not renewed at the appropriate times, which would have been in various years up to 1960. (Details here on the copyright law involved.)

Chapter and Section Numbering, Local Links

Both chapters (large numbers) and sections (small numbers) mark local links, according to a consistent scheme; you can therefore link directly to any passage. Similarly, for citation purposes, the Loeb edition pagination and the frequently used traditional pagination of Casaubon's 1620 edition — down the right-hand and left-hand side of the page respectively — are both indicated by local links in the sourcecode. It should be noticed that the latter usually don't coincide with the sections and chapters, so that if for example your nineteenth-century text refers to "p. 67" you may have to look both at the end of Book I and at the beginning of Book II.

Inconsistencies in the English Translation

Somewhat understandably, since Prof. Jones' edition and translation of Strabo appeared over the course of fifteen years, he fell into a few minor inconsistencies that do not represent any inconsistencies in the Greek text. I've let them stand, but the reader should be aware of them. In addition to fairly frequent inconsistencies of capitalization, hyphenation, diacriticals, and rendering of proper names by Greek-like or Latinate forms, the main ones I noticed:

• Cherronese, Chersonese
• Cinnamon-producing Country, Cinnamon-bearing Country
• Egypt, Aegypt
• Ethiopia, Aethiopia
• inhabited world, habited world
• Magnetans, Magnesians
• Massalia, Massilia
• Rhenus, Rhine

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
UP TO:		Topographia Antiqua	Latin & Greek Texts	LacusCurtius	Home
A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

Accessibility