Outline and goals

Today one can remain comfortably at home and, with a single click of the mouse, take a detailed look at a street-corner in a city on the other side of the world, examine a river delta in a remote continent, or learn the dimensions of a mountain hundreds of kilometres away. In antiquity, an age when individuals rarely left their birthplace, horizons were narrow and bounded by unknown and frightening regions, and instruments were simple. How could men discover that the earth was round? How did they estimate its size? How did traders and settlers look for new territory in unknown regions? How did generals set out with armies from Greece to Iran or India? The Greeks and Romans did all that and more, and produced achievements that in many ways still form the basis of our own ideas of geography.

Geography – literally a written or drawn description of the earth (gê) – always and everywhere originates in an awareness of one’s own surroundings, in encounters with foreign places and peoples and, like any human realm of knowledge, in simple curiosity and the wish to define observed phenomena. These three motives – awareness, encounters and curiosity – must have existed in the early periods of Greek cultural formation, and persisted in various degrees throughout antiquity. Greek studies of landscapes and the environment, along with an interest in remote regions and ideas about the shape of the earth, prevailed long before these issues were recognized as a discipline.