Strabons Geographika (review)

Strabo's Geography is one of few remaining major classical works not yet published in a complete critical edition. The great length of his text and the complexity of its manuscript tradition have tended to wear out the lives of his editors: Wolfgang Aly, generally considered the most reliable of these, died before completing the first third of the project (after himself inheriting the posthumous materials of Benedict Niese), and Francesco Sbordone progressed only slightly further in the Rome edition before his death. The Budé version, begun in the 1960s by Germaine Aujac and François Lassère and now apparently halted after reaching book 12, has been deemed sorely deficient (see, e.g., the review by Dicks of the first volume, CR n.s. 21 [1971] 88–94). No Oxford Classical Text has ever existed nor is one planned, to my knowledge, while the Loeb edition begun by J. R. S. Sterrett and completed by Horace Leonard Jones lacks a critical apparatus. What is more, no complete commentary on the Geography has been produced since that of Casaubon in the seventeenth century.

A group of scholars who first assembled at Groningen in 1982, led by Stefan Radt, set out to fill these gaps, and the first two of their projected ten-volume text, translation, and commentary have now appeared. To judge by these initial volumes, which contain the text of Geography books 1–8 with facing German translation, and by the sample section of commentary Radt published in a 1991 article in Mnemosyne, the project will undoubtedly succeed in giving us a definitive, reliable, comprehensive edition of Strabo. Radt and his team are proceeding with consummate care, both in their editorial choices and in the overall design and presentation of the series and its individual volumes.

Many innovations have been made here to assist scholars grappling with the immensity of Strabo's work and the great variety of material it contains. Headings at the top of each page situate us both in the text (referenced both by book/chapter numbers and by "C" page numbers derived from Casaubon's 1620 edition) and in geographic space. Line numbers at the edge of the page are arranged in such a way that each new Casaubon page starts at line 1, making it possible, for the first time, for scholars to cite Strabo passages by a precise and uniform system (e.g., "Strabo 266C4" designates a single line of text). Cross-references to fragment collections of, say, Eratosthenes—of which there are a great number in book 1 in particular—are given in parentheses within both the Greek text and the facing translation, rather than in footnotes as in the Budé edition.

The critical apparatus is extremely clear and complete, and judicious choices have been made from among the variant readings. In general Radt follows the theory of manuscript transmission put forward by Diller, but he also chooses, unlike his predecessors, to avoid grouping manuscripts together and assigning them common sigla on the basis of shared errors or omissions. All sigla used by Radt, that is, refer to individual, extant manuscripts—a sensible precaution against the dangers of creating phantom exemplars which then go on to influence editorial judgments. Another sensible choice has relegated minor, inconsequential textual variants to an appendix at the back of each volume, where they do not distract the reader from the more important cruces.

The exacting methodology employed by Radt and his team can be judged by their decision to publish the Epitome and Chrestomathy, short redactions of portions of Strabo's text, in the ninth volume of the series (tentatively scheduled to appear in 2010), and by the elegant arrangement that they have made...