Dr. Dmitry A. Shcheglov

A ‘Canon’ of Hellenistic Geographers?

Chair: Samantha Sink | Trinity College Dublin

Abstract | Ancient geographical sources stand out among other Greco-Roman scholarly literature for their relatively frequent practice of listing prominent predecessors or simply citing them. These lists largely determine how the history of ancient geography is narrated today. Predictably, modern narratives foreground the same well-known figures (e.g., Eratosthenes, Strabo, Ptolemy, etc). This prominence largely reflects the fact that geographical literature underwent selection processes similar to those observed in other fields, resulting in the emergence of established canons of major poets, dramatists, orators, and historians.

To assess how stable the “canon” (a term applicable here only in a loose sense) of ancient geographers was, and how many authors may have fallen outside the standard histories of ancient geography, I propose a comparative analysis of the lists provided by different sources. The most detailed and authoritative among these—Strabo for the entire Hellenistic era, and Eratosthenes (known to us primarily through Strabo) for the preceding period—offer a convenient baseline for this comparison.

The main question I ultimately seek to address is: to what extent can the modern narrative of ancient geography be considered reliable, and how might it have differed had the corpus of surviving sources been different?