Strabo Biography

Strabo was a Greek geographer and historian who lived more than two thousand years ago, in the early days of the Roman Empire. He belonged to a wealthy and renowned family and received an excellent education, initially in Asia Minor and later in Rome. In Rome, he met several important men such as Aelius Gallus, who arranged for him the Roman citizenship. Later, he accompanied Gallus to Egypt and then travelled around the region extensively. Afterwards, he returned to Rome where he lived for the rest of his life, studying and writing the historical and physical characteristics of the world he knew. The geography he wrote was not only a representation of the topographical and political situation of that period but also a description of the widely accepted notion of the earth. Sourced from his own experience, and knowledge shared by great men of the past, it featured all the communities and countries known to the Greeks and Romans during the rule of Augustus. His work, ‘Geographica’, was a very valuable collection of facts and presented a remarkable insight into the world as it appeared to knowledgeable men in the Augustan Age.