Select Audience. In the centuries following Homer, most geographers were educated and wealthy men with leisure time to devote to writing and research. They composed descriptions of inhabited lands and drew maps for a tiny and highly specialized audience (educated and wealthy like themselves), and their works were not in wide circulation. The knowledge of the ancient geographer was limited: he relied mainly on earlier authors and the accounts of colonists, traders, and early explorers. There were many traveler's tales that circulated in antiquity; most geographers merely selected those they thought credible (and a few they found merely plausible) for insertion into their own work. The position of most of the places which the geographers wrote about and indicated on maps would have been unknown to the average Greek of the period. Because advances made by early explorers and geographers were confined to a...