[750-word abstract of a paper delivered in September 2013 in St Andrews. I would welcome suggestions for revision/expansion: Jason König, jpk3@st-andrews.ac.uk]

This paper argues (drawing on recent work on the politics of landscape representation in cultural geography and landscape studies) that representation of mountains plays a key role in Strabo’s exploration of the distinction between civilised and uncivilised territories within the Mediterranean world.

Some aspects of Strabo’s mountains are in line with what we find in other ancient authors, for example the cartographic use of mountains (Strabo starts nearly every account of a new region with an account of its shape, with reference to its mountains–also rivers and coastlines), and the ethnographic association between rough mountains and uncivilised peoples.

In other respects, however, Strabo is unusual, especially in the frequency with which he returns to the subject of human domestication of mountains (which is surprisingly infrequent in earlier geographical and historiographical writing). In some books–most strikingly of all in his account of Iberia in Book 1–he emphasizes repeatedly the way in which Rome has pacified brigands and brought political and military control to wild populations (cf. Geography 2.5.26: ‘the cold mountainous regions furnish by nature only a wretched existence to their inhabitants, yet even the regions of poverty and piracy become civilised as soon as they get good administrators’).

Elsewhere, by contrast, he gives a very different impression of the way in which mountains can be integrated within human civilisation in a more organic way. That theme is concentrated especially in his portrayal of Italy in Book 5, and mainland Greece in Book 8: in these sections we repeatedly encounter descriptions of cities built into hillsides, and mountains associated with economic advantage and religious knowledge (the differences between Strabo and Pausanias are often stressed, but in his books on mainland Greece Strabo is much closer to Pausanias than he is elsewhere). There are some scattered examples of the pacification-of-brigands motif, but they are usually linked (again especially for Greece) with the distant past (e.g. 9.1.4 for the killing of robbers by Theseus at the Sceironian rocks).

Strabo’s account of the hills of Rome is part of that wider narrative of the domestication of mountain landscape (although it has to my knowledge never been read in relation to that wider theme in the text as a whole). It also stands out in ancient Greco-Roman literature as an unusual example of aesthetic appreciation of mountain landscape: ‘the early Romans made but little account of the beauty of Rome, because they were occupied with other, greater and more necessary, matters; whereas the later Romans, and particularly those of today and in my time, have not fallen short in this respect either — indeed, they have filled the city with many beautiful structures…the crowns of those hills that are above the river and extend as far as its bed, which present to the eye the appearance of a stage-painting (σκηνογραφικὴν ὄψιν) — all this, I say, affords a spectacle that one can hardly draw away from’. (5.3.8). For Strabo, it seems, appreciation of the beauty of the land can follow only after it has been brought under control.

There is thus a distinction running through the work between rough mountains which been only recently and in many cases imperfectly pacified, and other regions whose mountains have been domesticated much longer ago. In practice, however, the distinction between those spheres is sometimes undermined as we read, and the final section of the paper examines Strabo’s representation of the region of Pontus in Book 12 in order to demonstrate that. The pacification-of-brigands motif recurs repeatedly in that book in references to the Roman victory over Mithridates, but the uncivilised/civilised dichotomy is not secure here. Most importantly, the depiction of Strabo’s home city of Amaseia, which is built into the rocky landscape around it, recalls the civilised cities of Italy in Book 5 (this is another much analysed passage which like the depiction of the hills of Rome has never been much discussed in relation to portrayal of hills and mountains elsewhere in the work).

The final section of the paper draws comparisons with a series of other geographical and historiographical authors (focusing especially on his late Hellenistic contemporaries and early imperial successors up to the second and early third century CE) in order to explore the possibility that Strabo’s preoccupations with this theme of human control over physical landscape may be at least partly explained by his Augustan context–although I also stress the hazards of relying on a reductive appeal to political context, given how different Strabo’s work is even from what we find in contemporary authors like Dionysius and Diodorus.