c. 64 BCE–24 CE · geographer · historian
Strabo of Amaseia
Στράβων
In Alexandria: c. 25–20 BCE
Lived in Alexandria in the 20s BCE and went up the Nile with the prefect Aelius Gallus. Book 17 of his Geography is the only eyewitness description of the Mouseion: a walk, an exedra, a hall where the scholars dined together, a priest. In his description of the city he does not mention the Library.
Their life and work
He came from Amaseia in Pontus and wrote his Geography late in life, under Augustus and Tiberius. His book on Egypt walks the city from the harbours inland: the Pharos and the Heptastadion, the palaces, the Mouseion, the Sema, the gymnasium and the Paneion, and Lake Mareotis behind. Because he lived there in the 20s BCE, some twenty years after Caesar's war, his silence counts. He describes the Mouseion's company of learned men, their common hall and their priest, without naming any of them, and in all his account of the city says nothing of books burned, or of a library. Elsewhere, writing of Aristotle's books, he says that Aristotle taught the kings of Egypt how to arrange a library (13.1.54): the silence is in his description of Alexandria.
Our device: Their emblem is a traveller's staff. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Strabo of Amaseia, Geography · c. 20 BCE - 23 CE · Survives whole
Moments
- c. 25–20 BCE · Strabo describes the Mouseion and names no library Known: attested
In the show
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Sources (5)
- Strabo, Geography 2.5.12; 17.1.8 (opens in a new tab)
- R. S. Bagnall, "Alexandria: Library of Dreams", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 146.4 (2002) 348–362 357
- Strabo, Geography 17.1.6–10 (opens in a new tab)
- Strabo, Geography 13.1.54 (opens in a new tab)
- J. McKenzie, The Architecture of Alexandria and Egypt, c. 300 BC to AD 700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)