Strabo: The Man Who Wrote the World for Empire

If you want a snapshot of the ancient world at the exact moment Rome turns from republic into empire, you don’t start with a general or a senator. You start with a Greek intellectual from the edge of Anatolia who decided to do something wildly ambitious: describe the entire known world in one book—and explain why it mattered.

That man was Strabo of Amasia (c. 63 BC–AD 24). His 17-book Geography is the first surviving descriptive geography from the Western tradition. But Strabo didn’t think “geographer” was enough to capture what he was doing. In his mind, geography wasn’t a hobby for map nerds—it was a tool of statecraft.

He wrote for leaders. For rulers. For people who wanted to expand.

Geography as a weapon of government

Right at the start, Strabo makes his purpose blunt: his work is essential reading for anyone interested in politics, especially those involved in imperial expansion. The logic is simple: the greatest commanders rule land and sea, pull peoples and cities under one authority, and therefore need knowledge of continents, seas, and frontiers.

In other words: to govern the world, you must first “write” the world.

Even the Greek term geographia says it. Literally: “writing the earth/world.” Not merely observing it—inscribing it into an ordered account.

So Strabo’s Geography is not just travel writing. It’s a manual for empire dressed as scholarship.

support our project

At History Affairs, we believe history belongs to everyone.
Your contribution helps us keep this global archive open, free, and growing — so people everywhere can learn from the past and shape a better future.

donate

A life built out of overlapping empires

Strabo’s obsession with politics makes more sense once you look at his background.

He was born in Pontus, in what’s now Turkey—an area that had long been ruled by kings who were culturally Greek but had Persian origins. His family belonged to the local elite. They had deep ties to the Pontic court, especially to its most famous ruler: Mithridates VI, Rome’s relentless enemy.

Mithridates fought Rome again and again until Rome finally crushed him and absorbed Pontus in 63 BC—the very year Strabo was born, or close to it.

Even within Strabo’s family, loyalty was complicated. He says his relatives served the Pontic court for generations, but things soured when his grandfather switched sides near the end of the Mithridatic Wars and handed 15 forts to the Romans. That one decision—turning from Mithridates to Rome—shaped Strabo’s future.

He grew up Greek-speaking and educated in Asia Minor… then went to Rome to continue his studies, using the capital’s libraries—stocked with Greek book-rolls carried off through conquest.

So Strabo is a kind of living bridge:

• Greek education
• Persian-linked dynastic background
• Roman political access
• and a lifetime spent watching power change hands

It would be surprising if he didn’t write a book trying to make sense of it all.

Writing during the storm: civil wars and Augustus’ new world

Strabo lived through Rome’s most chaotic turning point:

• the civil wars of Caesar and Pompey
• the later clash between Mark Antony and Octavian
• and finally the death of the Republic and rise of the Empire under Augustus (traditionally dated to 27 BC)

His Geography was conceived in a world being reorganized at speed—administratively, militarily, ideologically. Rome wasn’t just winning wars; it was building a new “common sense” about what the world was and who should rule it.

Strabo’s book fits that moment perfectly. By describing each region’s land, culture, and history, he was also—quietly—helping to cement Rome’s new political reality.

The trick: Rome, but with Greek roots

Here’s where Strabo gets interesting (and revealing).

He often emphasizes continuity between Greek and Roman culture, and he repeatedly pushes the idea—directly or indirectly—that Rome’s story is entangled with Greek origins. He loves tales of Greek heroes visiting or founding places in Italy. He downplays native Italian traditions. He makes Greece feel like the cultural source-code of the Mediterranean.

Odysseus. Evander. Greek settlers and mythic founders. The message isn’t subtle:

Rome may be powerful, but Greece came first.

It’s a Hellenocentric move, and it does real work:

• It flatters Roman elites who admired Greek culture.
• It elevates Strabo’s own world as the intellectual foundation of the new empire.
• And it frames Roman dominance as the latest chapter in a longer, “civilized” story that Greece began.

So while Strabo writes for Rome’s leaders, he also sneaks in a claim: the heart of Rome’s power is, in a sense, Greek.

Homer as “evidence”: when poetry becomes geopolitics

Strabo’s strangest arguments often come from his reverence for Homer.

He calls Homer “the first who ventured to begin to engage in geography,” treating the Iliad and Odyssey not only as epic poems but as historical proof of early Greek knowledge and reach.

That creates a problem: Homer is not writing a survey report. So Strabo sometimes uses the poems to “prove” Greek exploration or colonization in places where the text doesn’t clearly support it. He reads Odysseus’ long journey as evidence Greeks visited Italy long before Rome—even though Italy isn’t explicitly framed that way in the poem. He tries to connect regions near his own Pontus to heroic voyages (Jason and the Argonauts, the Black Sea route) whether or not Homer truly anchors those claims.

This is where Strabo becomes deeply human: brilliant, learned, but also biased—trying to make the world fit the story he wants to tell.

And it’s exactly the kind of bias that matters when “writing the world” becomes a political act.

Why Strabo still matters

Strabo left posterity something rare: a description of the Roman world at its birth, when imperial power was solidifying and the Mediterranean was being reimagined as a single connected space under one dominant authority.

His influence didn’t stop in antiquity, either. Later readers treated his “written world” as a world that could be completed. The text notes that Christopher Columbus read Strabo and found in it a vision of the world with gaps to be filled.

That’s the afterlife of geography as Strabo understood it: once the world is described, it can be claimed, corrected, expanded, conquered.

Strabo didn’t just map places. He mapped legitimacy.

He wrote the world in Greek—so Rome could rule it in Latin.