Trapped by Tradition:
Strabo, Arrian, and the Geography of India

Lee E. Patterson (Centre College)

Alexander the Great’s conquest of India, though temporary, opened up the Indus valley to Greek understanding in unprecedented ways.  Much information that began to spread across the Hellenistic world had originated with the observations of several members of Alexander’s court and army, including Onesicritus, Nearchus, and Megasthenes.  Though they were on hand to provide eye-witness accounts of local flora, fauna, customs, climate, and so on, bizarre descriptions of these things immediately began to circulate.  And as often happens, such descriptions began to snowball into claims deemed throughly unpalatable by later scholars, including the Greek geographer Strabo, writing in the early first century CE.  In his comments about India, Strabo takes these writers to task, wondering why descriptions of mouthless people, oxen-swallowing snakes, and gold-mining ants should arise from autopsies of the area, and glumly concludes that the motivations of these writers are unknowable (2.1.9).  And yet, as James Romm has observed (Edges of the Earth, 99-103), Strabo himself succumbs to same method of relating the marvelous in his own official treatise on India in Book 15 of his Geography.  Having moderated his earlier criticisms with almost apologetic descriptions of the current state of knowledge about India (15.1.2-3), Strabo leads us through a long list of marvels for which he cites the Hellenistic writers (15.1.37), offering none of the dismissals that constituted his methodology previously.

The question becomes, what motivated Strabo to follow suit with the same sort of marvel-telling to which he had earlier objected?  The answer was discernible to both Strabo and the historian Arrian, writing in the second century CE. Both men acknowledge that some geographical reshuffling had occurred in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, as when the Caucasus Mountains were moved further east so that Alexander could claim to have reached the legendary site of Prometheus’ torture (Strabo 11.5.5, Arrian Ana. 5.3.3).  But flattery of Alexander only partially explains it.  Both writers also recognized that such geography answered the powerful call of tradition, that, erroneous though it was, this geography had been handed down for centuries and had become popular and thus difficult to break away from (Strabo 11.6.4, Arrian Ana. 5.5.3).

Tradition had a powerful hold on how the Greeks and Romans represented geography, history (esp. earlier history, i.e., heroic myth), and other areas.  Despite the absurdity of giant gold-digging ants, Herodotus’ reference to them (3.102) obviously survived into the Hellenistic accounts.  What is said of the distant east can also be said of the distant past.  A healthy skeptism attends the conceptualization of the heroes by such educated writers as Thucydides, Aristotle, and Pausanias, who were critical of more fantastical elements or variants of a “canonical” version of a hero story.  And yet even they accepted the basic historicity of the heroes, partly because their stories had become traditional and widely accepted in the Greek world.  However much he diverged, the scholar of history or geography could never completely break away from the conventions of his culture even as he wrestled with them.  The hold of tradition was always present, especially in the geography of a region so distant that there were fewer checks on scholarly claims than normal.  Strabo and Arrian understood this state of affairs and were also trapped by it.