Ptolemaios: Handbuch der Geographie. Vol. 1. Einleitung und Buch 1–4. Vol. 2. Buch 5-8 und Indices (review)

The compendious, highly specialized, and textually complex geographic treatises of the ancient world have posed some of the most difficult challenges to modern editors, resulting in a great dearth of modern editions. The solution in recent years has been for large teams of scholars to work in collaboration, drawing on the support and funding of multiple institutions. A German team under Stefan Radt has been steadily working on a multivolume edition of Strabo in this way, and now a similarly collaborative effort led by Alfred Stückelberger and Gerd Grasshoff at the University of Bern has produced a handsome, useful, well-illustrated two-volume edition of Ptolemy's Geography, the first complete edition of the work in over 160 years. Eight assistants contributed by editing one each of the eight books of the Geography, and specialists in cartography and manuscript restoration were also employed—the latter because the team was given permission to photograph a valuable but badly deteriorated manuscript discovered in Istanbul in 1927, never before used by modern text editors.

The textual problems involved in editing a work like the Geography, which consists largely of a list of easily corruptible place-names and cartographic coordinates, are legion. The new edition makes over a thousand changes to the text of C. F. A. Nobbe, first published in 1843–45 and reprinted twice in recent decades. The newly incorporated Istanbul manuscript (K) is responsible for some of these. In general the editors have given preference to the W manuscript tradition (to which K belongs), though the readings of X, the single manuscript surviving from outside this tradition, have often been printed in parentheses within the text beside the W readings from which they differ (instead of being relegated to the apparatus). This seems a sensible mode of presentation, for where the spellings of obscure town names, or numerals, differ in the two traditions, there are no possible criteria for preferring one over the other. The number of such parentheses falls off dramatically after the middle of Book 5, the point at which the scribe of X, weary of the tedium of endless lists of numbers, simply stopped recopying Ptolemy's geographic coordinates.

The best features of this edition are its illustrations, formatting, and layout. The difficult mathematical and cartographic discussions in Ptolemy's first book are beautifully diagrammed, sometimes with original drawings, at other times with reproductions of drawings found in the manuscripts. In Book 8, where Ptolemy conducts a panoptic survey of the entire world map, the editors give twenty-six lavish multicolor maps translating his mathematical data into visual form (these maps are also accessible, and searchable, on the CD-ROM that accompanies the second volume). Within the text, place-names in this eighth book are printed in blue so as to catch the eye more readily. Throughout, the large font size and generous use of margins and space breaks make it easy for the reader to navigate through dense catalogues of names and numbers. A very thorough index of place-names completes the work, with modern toponyms thoughtfully supplied in parentheses after their ancient equivalents.

The beautiful world maps found in the manuscripts of the Geography, well known to students of Renaissance cartography, were almost certainly not original to Ptolemy but were supplied later by copyists and illustrators; hence they are excluded from this edition (apart from its lovely endpapers). A further volume is planned, however, which will include photographs of these and other manuscript illustrations, as well as a volume that will deal with questions of manuscript tradition, scientific background, and philological and interpretive questions. If these future volumes hew to the same high standards of expertise and presentation as the two pesent ones, they will be worthy contributions to the study of the Geography. As things stand, we have at last a definitive...