Strabo the Geographer: His Name and Its Meaning1)

Mne/1002/Pothecary/691-704 11/18/99 5:26 PM Page 691

STRABO THE GEOGRAPHER: HIS NAME AND ITS MEANING1)

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SARAH POTHECARY

The geographer Strabo is referred to in the sources and manu- scripts2) by that name alone, ‘Strabo’ or, in Greek, Strãbvn.3) The Greek name Strãbvn, meaning ‘cross-eyed’, is ﬁrst held by Greeks of the pre-Roman period.4) The Roman cognomen5) ‘Strabo’, also meaning ‘cross-eyed’, subsequently becomes established in the Roman

1) I gratefully acknowledge the comments of Peter Fraser, Heikki Solin, Bruce Robertson, and Luc Bertrand of Ackermans & van Haaren. The views here expressed are my own. An early draft of this paper was read at the annual meet- ing of the Classical Association of Canada in Ottawa on May 30th 1998. The following abbreviations of standard works are used: Latin Cognomina = Iiro Kajanto, The Latin Cognomina (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum, 36:2; Helsinki 1965); Lexicon = P.M. Fraser and Elaine Matthews, A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Oxford 1987-); L’Onomastique latine = Noël Duval, ed., L’Onomastique latine, Paris 13- 15 Octobre 1975 (Paris 1977); Pape-Benseler = Wilhelm Pape, Wörterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen, 3rd edition, rev. Gustav Benseler (Braunschweig 1884); Roman Onomastics = A.D. Rizakis, ed., Roman Onomastics in the Greek East. Social and Political Aspects. Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Roman Onomastics, Athens, 7-9 September 1993 (Athens 1996). 2) Book 9 of the 5th century ms. (the ‘Palimpsest’) of the Geography begins STPABVNOS Y; in some later mss., Strabo’s name is given in summaries pre- served at the beginning of books and apparently copied from earlier mss. See Aubrey Diller, The Textual Tradition of Strabo’s Geography (Amsterdam 1975), 21-22, and 29. Literary references to Strabo: Wolfgang Aly, ed., Strabonis Geographica, 1 (Antiquitas, 1:9; Bonn 1968), 1*-8*. References to Strabo as geographer: Diller, Textual Tradition, 7-18. References to Strabo as historian: FGrHist 91; Ernst Honigmann, Strabon 3, RE 4A.1 (1931), 76-155, esp. 87-89; Delﬁno Ambaglio, Gli Historika hypomnemata di Strabone: introduzione, traduzione italiana e commento dei frammenti (Memorie dell’Istituto Lombardo—Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, Classe di Lettere—Scienze Morali e Storiche, 39:5; Milan 1990), 377-425. 3) Whether our geographer’s name is written in Greek or Latin in the source depends, of course, on the language of the source. For consistency and conve- nience, I use Latin forms for all names throughout this article, except when cit- ing speciﬁc sources in the notes, where I use the language of the source. 4) Pape-Benseler, s.v. Strãbvn. Friedrich Bechtel, Die historischen Personennamen des Griechischen bis zur Kaiserzeit (1917), 490. Lexicon 1 and 3A (of those volumes pub- lished so far), s.v. Strãbvn. 5) ‘Roman cognomina’, as the term is used in this article, are traditional cognomina from the Roman naming system, including those which, like ‘Strabo’, are

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naming system in Republican times.6) The geographer Strabo was Greek by descent but was born into a Romanised world. His family’s ancestral home, Amasia,7) had been part of the Greek king- dom of Pontus in Asia Minor before its defeat by the Romans in 66 BC, and Strabo himself was born in the late 60’s or 50’s BC.8) Scholars have long been intrigued by our geographer’s name. One approach has been to use it to identify possible family connections for, although Strabo names his great great-grandfather and his great- grandfather, he names neither parents nor grandparents.9) Ettore Pais10) deduced from our geographer’s name and from the information that he received his early education at Nysa that he might be related to the ‘Servilius Strabo’ included by Cicero11) among the ‘Nysaeans’ in a letter of commendation. A second approach has been to establish whether our geographer’s name is Greek or Roman, and the recent tendency has been to see it as a Roman cognomen and to link it with the Roman citizenship which, it is generally assumed, our geographer held.12) Most inﬂuentially, Glen Bowersock

ultimately of non-Latin origin. For the difficulty in finding an appropriate term, see notes 27 and 34. 6) Latin Cognomina, 239. 7) Strabo calls Amasia his ‘fatherland’ (patr¤w) (12.3.15 C547—all references are to Strabo’s Geography unless otherwise indicated) and ‘my or our city’ (≤ ≤met°ra pÒliw) (12.3.39 C561), which might simply mean that he considered it his family seat, or that it was his actual birth-place. Even if Strabo was born in Amasia, his own words show that he was at Nysa in Roman Asia for his early education (14.1.48 C650). 8) Strabo’s birth used to be put in 64 BC, but I suggest, in The Expression ‘Our Times’ in Strabo’s Geography, CP 92.3 (1997), 235-246, that our geographer was born in the following decade. See also Katherine Clarke, In Search of the Author of Strabo’s Geography, JRS 87 (1997), 92-110. 9) Strabo himself (10.4.10 C478; 11.2.18 C499; 12.3.33 C557) provides the only information we have on his family tree. See ‘Strabo’s Family Tree’ at the end of this article. 10) Ettore Pais, Intorno al tempo ed al luogo in cui Strabone compose la geografia storica, in: idem, Italia Antica, 1 (Bologna 1922), 267-316, esp. 299 n. 1, noted by Honigmann, Strabon 3, RE 4A.1 (1931), 79-80. Pais sees in ‘Servilius Strabo’ a possible client of Publius Servilius Isauricus, to whom our geographer was possibly connected in some way (12.6.2 C568). 11) Cicero Fam. 13.64.1. Cicero uses the inverted form ‘cognomen + nomen’, i.e. ‘Strabo Servilius’. Since the letter is written ca. 50 BC, if Servilius Strabo is a relative of our geographer, he is an older relative. 12) G.C. Richards, Strabo. The Anatolian who failed of Roman Recognition, Greece and Rome 10 (1940-41), 79-90, esp. 81: “. . . it is difficult to say whether the name... came to him from a Roman or a Greek source”. G.W. Bowersock, in