Strabo
Geography, Book 5 — northern and central Italy, Rome, and the Bay of Naples
Γεωγραφικά ε · Composed in the reign of Augustus and revised under Tiberius; c. 7 BCE - 23 CE. The description of Vesuvius at 5.4.8 was written at least half a century before the eruption of 79 CE.
Strabo walks Italy from the Alps to Naples. The plain of the Po and its pig farms, the Etruscans, Corsica's bandits, the Sabines and the roads out of Rome. Then the famous comparison: the Greeks chose city sites for beauty and harbours, the Romans built what the Greeks neglected, roads, aqueducts and sewers, so that whole rivers run through the city. And on the Bay of Naples, a green and fertile mountain whose summit looks burnt, which Strabo guesses was once a volcano that went out for lack of fuel. He was writing about fifty years before Vesuvius buried Pompeii.
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
Hans Claude Hamilton and William Falconer, Bohn's Classical Library (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854-57). Victorian and rather stiff, and it smooths Strabo's compressed, list-like technical prose into flowing English sentences, which makes him sound more discursive and less like a reference work than he is. Square brackets mark words the translators supplied. Technical vocabulary and units are sometimes rendered loosely, and place names follow nineteenth-century spellings (Neapolis, Dicaearchia, Baiae with a diaeresis).