Strabo: The Geographer Who Saw Mountain Seashells as Rising Crust

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Strabo was born around 64 or 63 BC in Amaseia in the Kingdom of Pontus, now Amasya in Turkey, during the Mithridatic Wars. His grandfather served Mithridates VI but defected to Rome and handed over Pontic fortresses, and the family likely gained Roman citizenship. Strabo grew up Persian in roots, Greek in language and Roman in politics. He studied rhetoric in Nysa, where he took Homer as geography, and around age 21 moved to Rome, studying under Xenarchus and then the Stoic Athenodorus Cananites, tutor to Augustus. Under the Pax Romana he traveled from the Black Sea to the borders of Ethiopia and from Tuscany to Egypt, sailing up the Nile around 25 BC with the Roman prefect and a military escort.

His 17-book Geographica, with early versions around 7 BC, was written for statesmen and governors and favored peoples, customs and economies over the mathematical approach of Eratosthenes. It is politically pro-Roman but treats Greek culture as superior. Where he saw places himself he was sharp; where he relied on reports, as for India, he recorded winged scorpions and flying reptiles. His geology was ahead of its time. Rejecting theories of evaporating or silt-raised seas, he argued that the land itself rises and sinks, carrying marine shells up mountains, and that the past should be explained by processes observed today. He died around AD 24, and his work survived through Byzantine copyists.

• He rejected a guide's claim that stones near the pyramids were petrified lentils, having seen similar stones on a hill near Amaseia.
• He traced a scorched plain in Anatolia to ancient underground fires rather than the monster Typhon, and noted its fine vineyards.
• He described volcanoes as vents releasing pressure beneath the earth.
• He was the first known writer to identify two river names used by different peoples as the same river, the Danube.
• Geologist Charles Lyell later quoted him with praise for grasping the immensity of geological time.