Emily Kneebone: Mapping power in late Hellenistic and imperial Greek geographical poetry

This paper examines how Greek geographical poems from the late Hellenistic and imperial periods foreground and explore the relationship between poetry and patronage, Greece and Rome. My analysis takes as its primary focus the Periodos Ges of “pseudo-Scymnus”, an iambic periegesis of the world composed in the late second century BCE and addressed to a King Nicomedes of Bithynia. Reading the Periodos against a range of (primarily geographical) texts from the late Hellenistic and imperial periods, including the periegetic poems of Dionysius son of Calliphon (probably first century BCE) and Dionysius the Periegete (second century CE), my paper explores three recurring sites of debate in Hellenistic and imperial Greek literature. The first is the contested role of literature in society at large, refracted in particular through these poets’ own engagement with contemporary theoretical debates about the proper function and characteristics of poetry. The second is the relationship constructed between (didactic) poets and their patrons, figured above all in the close links established between the control of information and political control of the world. The final point of comparison is these poets’ evocations of the evolving relationship between Greek and Roman culture in the late Hellenistic and imperial worlds, brought to the fore in their depictions of Rome as an increasingly prominent physical space often presented as deeply shaped by its Greek cultural heritage.