Between Narrative and Allusion: Mythography in Pomponius Mela’s Chorography1 R. SCOTT SMITH University of New Hampshire
[email protected] 1. Introduction Pomponius Mela’s Chorography has been, until comparatively recently, a rather neglected text. 2 Yet even after the appearance of Parroni’s Italian (1984) and Silberman’s French editions (1988; 20032), Brodersen’s German translation (1994), and Romer’s English version (1998), Mela’s work remains relegated to second order status because, as a work of what we might loosely 1 An early version of this paper was delivered in the panel “Oppositional Tendencies in Myth and Mythography” at the 9th Celtic Conference in Classics in Dublin, June 2016. I am indebted to that audience, as well as to the anonymous referees of Polymnia, for their helpful comments and suggestions, which have improved the paper substantially. All remaining infelicities and translations are my own. 2 It has not always been so. See Brodersen 2003: 81–83 (for Mela in general 87–94). Polymnia - n°2 - 2016 88 R. SCOTT SMITH call “geography,”3 it is deficient in technical knowledge, inconsistent in its methodology, reliant on outdated sources and thus filled with erroneous material. A useful index of how modern scholars view Mela—“un geografo da tavolino” according to Parroni (1984: 34)—is Romer’s speculation that the Chorography was “a young man’s project,” one whose “jejune style may reflect its author’s naïveté as well as his youthful ambition.” 4 Since it is unoriginal and a product of uncritical compilation, Mela’s work simply does not hold up when compared to the works of more scholarly attempts to describe the world, such as those of Strabo or even Pliny, although the latter names Mela as a source for several books (3–6, 8, 12–13, 21–22).5 It is clear that Pliny thought that the Chorography was a serious work worth consulting.