“Did He Really Believe That?”: Belief and the Past in Strabo’s Geography

Nicholas Gresens (Indiana University/Monmouth College)

A brief glance at the main textbooks used in myth classes reveals a general consistency in the identification two subclasses or “genres” of myth—divine myth and legend—both of which must, one must assume, are distinct from history. As has often been recognized however, these subclasses are analytical, rather than natural, genres. That is, there is no guarantee that the ancient authors who recorded these narratives would have classified them as such. Similarly, many scholars have attempted to identify a distinction between the so-called spatium mythicum and spatium historicum in ancient writers like Thucydides and Herodotus. The question posed in this paper is whether through an analysis of narratives about the past in Strabo’s Geography we can move beyond these analytical genres to identify the native genres of narratives about the past that writers in the first century would have recognized.

While there are many factors that could be analyzed in Strabo’s descriptions of past events, this paper looks specifically at the period of history of the various narratives, what Strabo calls the narratives, and how he records the narratives to attempt to determine his attitude toward the various events. One of the major concerns in the study of native genres is determining the level of belief narrators have about their tales and by looking at these factors, this paper attempts to discover Strabo’s own modalities of belief. In so doing, this paper identifies several modes of narrative Strabo uses to describe the past that do not follow a simple linear progression from the recent and believable past to the distant and unbelievable, or mythical, past. Rather, the narratives depend more on the reliability of the source, the plausibility of the narrative (according to Strabo’s conception of how the world works), and the purpose the narrative served in the Geography than simple chronological markers.

To this extent, this paper demonstrates generally that we need to view ancient conceptions of the past as more nuanced than simple analytical genres allow us and specifically that Strabo is a much more critical historian than he is often credited with being. More broadly, this paper clearly shows that even attempting to identify native genres can lead to new appreciation of ancient writers.