This chapter aims to break new ground in our understanding of the relationship between Strabo and Pausania, in dialogue with the helpful starting-points laid out by Maria Pretzler in her chapter in Dueck, Lindsay and Pothecary (eds.) Strabo’s Cultural Geography. In doing so it also addresses broader questions about how we should understand the relationship between late Hellenistic and imperial culture. Pretzler rightly stresses the differences between the two texts. Most strikingly, Strabo aims to fit Greece into the wider Roman world, whereas Pausanias focuses much more narrowly on mainland Greece and on the classical past. That difference is partly a consequence of their different cultural and political contexts. The late Hellenistic and Augustan period when Strabo was writing saw many Greek writers working in Rome and dependent on Roman patronage, and still engaged in the project, started by Polybius, of negotiating Greece’s place in a new, Roman world. By the second century CE, by contrast, the increased wealth and confidence of the cities of the Greek east made it easier to live without constant reference to Rome; that development went hand-in-hand with increasing attention to the classical Greek past. Other differences, not discussed by Pretzler, are part of the same pattern. One thing which has been surprisingly little noted in recent Strabo scholarship is the parallelism between Italy and Greece in the evolving narrative of Strabo’s work, both of them characterised as civilised territories in contrast with the wilder lands around the edges of the Mediterranean. Strabo also celebrates human dominance over and alteration of the natural environment to an unusual degree, a theme which is clearly linked with his broadly celebratory representation of Roman imperial control. That theme is particularly prominent in Book 5, which is full of examples of cities built into the landscape, around mountains and marshes, not least in Strabo’s remarkable account of the city of Rome as a human-altered landscape. It has parallels in the writing of others from the same period–e.g. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, especially Book 3 on the landscape of Rome and its hills, or Vitruvius, De architectura, especially Book 2 on manipulation of natural materials as a key part of architectural practice–although none of them goes so far as Strabo. It has often been suggested in modern ecocriticism that anthropocentric approaches to landscape, which sanction alteration of the natural environment for human use, can be traced back to the ancient world, and Strabo supports that view, but he is in fact far from typical. Pausanias, by contrast, tends to take a much more sceptical view of landscape alteration, linking it with hybris, drawing on the dominant strand of ambivalence about human interference in the natural world which stretches back in the historiographical tradition at least as far as Herodotus. That attitude does seem in his case to be linked with his more standoffish attitude towards Roman rule. In all of those ways Pretzler’s overarching contrast between Strabo and Pausanias, and between their respective periods, seems entirely valid. This chapter also suggests, however, that it needs to be nuanced. For one thing there are important areas of convergence between them, in addition to the differences. In making that argument I focus again on Strabo Book 5, where there is a conspicuous and recurrent engagement with Greek religion, history and myth, used to explain particular sites: Strabo actually sounds very Pausanian in places in Book 5, by comparison with other parts of the work (as he does also in his account of mainland Greece in Books 8 and 9–that similarity is usually ignored). That too makes Strabo of his time: in particular the way in which he stresses Italy’s Greek past brings him close to Dionysius of Halicarnassus and his famous characterisation of Rome as a Greek city. But it also suggests that we should be careful about overstating the contrast with Pausanias, whose methods are so similar. Second, even if we accept the basic contrast between these two authors it is clear that there are certain hazards in extrapolating to a sweeping contrast between the intellectual culture of their respective periods: at the very least we need to be careful to avoid overstatement. In many ways Pausanias is untypical. There are plenty of examples, in the later period too, of attempts to combine Roman and Greek culture within the framework of an encyclopaedic composition: Plutarch’s Lives and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists are both cases in point. There are also other later examples of authors celebrating Roman landscape-alteration: Aristides’ Praise of Rome is a case in point. It may be right, then, that there is nothing quite like Strabo in the long second century CE, and that the conditions that produced his work were no longer in existence by the time Pausanias was writing. But neither is there a clear break between the two periods.