SOURCE: “Strabo” in A History of Ancient Geography, Cambridge University Press, 1897, pp. 238-60.

In the following essay, Tozer provides an overview of Strabo’s life and of the Geography,explaining the work’s importance and its distinguishing features, and providing an outline of its seventeen books.

It may be regarded as a piece of extraordinary good fortune that the most important work on geography which was produced in antiquity should have coincided in date with the Augustan age. The knowledge of the world which the ancients possessed had then almost reached its furthest limits, while the interest which had been awakened by Greek enquirers in the scientific side of the subject had not yet been neutralised, as it was destined soon to be, by utilitarian views of geographical study. At various preceding periods, as we have seen, the different branches of the enquiry had occupied, each in its...