Introduction

The island of Delos, despite its small size, enjoyed a critical importance in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. In myth, it was the spot where Leto gave birth to Apollo and Artemis. In the Archaic and Classical Periods it was home to an increasingly important cluster of religious sanctuaries that became the centre of a series of international groupings including, most famously, the Delian League. In the Hellenistic Period its religious and commercial communities grew enormously, attracting divinities, worshippers and traders from all over the ancient world, making it one of the most cosmopolitan communities in the Mediterranean (cf. Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.10). In the Roman world, its convenient midway location in the Aegean and accessible free port facilitated continued and increasing commercial success, as well as its eventual destruction due to ongoing pirate raids and invasions.

What makes Delos even more distinctive, however, especially for those studying the ancient world today, is the extraordinary breadth of the surviving evidence for its activities. Literary sources including the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo, Thucydides and Callimachus combine with a mass of epigraphical data as well as the plentiful archaeological evidence for the religious, athletic and civic landscape of the island (cf. Figure 2.1). Above all, the picture presented to us by this wealth of evidence is of a Delos that became an increasingly cosmopolitan community over time, worshipping a combination of many local, Hellenic and foreign cults, assimilated and syncretised in an imaginative number of ways (Bruneau 1970; Bruneau and Ducat 2005: 49–53, 58–9, 64).

Introduction

Lefebvre argued in his influential book The Production of Space (1991 (1974): 15) that ‘any search for space in literary texts will find it everywhere and in every guise: enclosed, described, projected, dreamt of, speculated about’. Since the original publication of Lefebvre’s work, there has been, as noted in the introduction, a vast growth in interest in space and spatiality across a wide variety of literary genres in both Greek and Roman scholarship. This final case-study seeks to utilise these recent advances in the understanding of space and text in the analysis of a work particularly concerned with space: Strabo’s Geography.

The first section aims to set up the context for, and demonstrate the importance of, that analysis, first by examining recent approaches to the genre of geographical and universal history-writing and second by looking at how past scholarship has investigated and characterised Strabo and his Geography. In particular, it will focus on showing how past scholarship has been insufficiently interested in Strabo’s treatment of the world at a regional level (i.e. that of ‘Italy’, or ‘Greece’). This chapter will then take as its focus Strabo’s portrayal of Greece within the Geography, investigating the meaning and value of Greece as a space within the oikoumene of Strabo (cf. Figure 5.1), and the ways in which that spatial meaning has been constructed. The analysis will be divided into three sections: first, an examination of how Strabo conceptualises geographical knowledge and frames his project; second, an investigation of how Greece is constructed as a space within Strabo’s narratives of other parts of the oikoumene; and third, Strabo’s narrative construction of the space of Greece itself. In so doing, I hope to show how a spatial approach can contribute also to our understanding of the wider context of Strabo’s writing, his audience, the transitional world of Augustan and Tiberian Rome, and Strabo’s place within it.

Introduction

In a recent Companion to Ancient History (Erskine 2009), little mention is made of Cyrene. Such absence is not unusual: the volume on Greeks beyond the Aegean (Karageorghis 2002), for example, contains nothing on Cyrene at all. But where it is mentioned most in Erskine (2009) is instructive: not in the chapter on North Africa, but in the chapter on concepts of citizenship. A quick look through the surviving ancient literature and modern scholarship on Cyrene shows an overwhelming interest in the story of its foundation, the celebration of its ruling kings, the arrangement of its later democratic constitution and the intrigue of its political place and stance within the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. Running through all these approaches is a common thread: that Cyrene is, from the standpoint of the literary sources, most often a creation of other writers, times and places.

There has also been a significant amount of work conducted on the physical remains of Cyrene. Many of the key parts of the city have been excavated, and, equally importantly, so have several of the major settlements in the wider region of Cyrenaica (cf. Figure 1.1). That material has been published in a series of excavation reports. Yet the excavations and publications are still far from complete, and some of the finds have been extremely difficult to date. Moreover, where particular spaces have been well excavated, such as the city’s agora (cf. Figure 1.9), the tendency in the resulting publications has been to split up different sides of the agora into individual volumes, the maps of which show only the particular structures under consideration rather than the agora as a whole. This is coupled with a primary focus on the borders of the agora rather than its centre, and with a decision to concentrate on finding architectural parallels for the structures from around the Greek world rather than thinking about how those structures related to others immediately surrounding them.

Introduction

There is an immense array of scholarship on death and burial in the Roman world, covering a wide range of investigative approaches and types of evidence. In particular, previous scholarship has highlighted both a series of overarching factors affecting and a conventional development timeline for the design and location of Roman tombs. Those factors range from the changing preference for inhumation or cremation and the changing rules surrounding burial to the acculturation of different styles in different parts of the Roman world. The timeline charts a move from modest graves in the early Republic to more showy and ornate tombs located in arenas of high visibility peaking in the late Republic, followed by an even wider diversity of communal tomb forms (columbaria) in the early Empire. The popularity of stone monuments tails off from the end of the second century AD, and even columbaria gradually give way to the use of underground catacombs in the third and (particularly) fourth centuries AD as the role of the cemetery and the importance of tombs as display markers shifted (cf. Bodel 2008; Hope 2009: 162).

Yet even scholars who have published widely in this area highlight the need for more work to be done, especially that which places these tombs fully within their spatial environment (e.g. Koortbojian 1996: 211; Jaeger 1997: 26; Larmour and Spencer 2007: 7; Hope 2009: 153, 159, 186). This is an opportune moment at which to respond to such a call. There has recently been a renewed interest in understanding the complexities of urban space and how it was perceived (e.g. the importance of mobility, procession and other kinds of action within urban space: Hope and Huskinson 2011; Laurence and Newsome 2011; O’Sullivan 2011). Equally, the importance and meaning of the major Roman roads along which these tombs lay have recently been re-emphasised, with a special focus on their spatial dimensions as connectors between different arenas of activity (e.g. Jackson 1984: 26–7; Dyson 1992: 148; Lomas 1998; Laurence 1999: 157–8; Hope 2009: 155; Spencer 2010: 55). Most importantly, the ‘suburbs’ of Roman cities, where many of these tombs were located, have also recently been under the spotlight, revealing the much more complex interplay between social, economic and political activities, as well as the way in which they mediated the wider relationship between city and countryside (e.g. Purcell 1987; Hope 2000c; Patterson 2000; Coates-Stephens 2004; Graham 2005; Gray 2006; Rosen and Sluiter 2006; Hope 2009: 154–5, 176–7).

Introduction

The case-studies examined over the previous chapters have sought to illustrate not just the variety of forms a spatial approach can take but also the kinds of advantages and insights such approaches can offer for the study of the ancient world. In Chapter 1, in response to spatial scholarship that has not recently been focused on agora-type civic space, and to scholarship on Cyrene that has focused on the city’s turbulent political history so often constructed through sources from other places and times, I investigated the spatial development of particular structures within the city’s agora. This chapter thus not only provided a way into understanding Cyrene’s political development from a Cyrenean perspective but also offered a detailed window on the way that change was formulated, negotiated and perceived over time as well as the way in which, and the key moments during which, the agora space was developed and utilised in comparison to other types of space within the city (cf. Figures 1.1, 1.9).

The focus in Chapter 2 moved from civic space to sacred space and from individual structures to the relationships between spaces for the gods on Delos. In response to scholarship on Delos’ wide pantheon that so often focused on the literary and epigraphical evidence, a spatial approach to how its multiple networks of polytheism developed on the ground over time was adopted in order to provide a crucial counter-vantage point from which to understand the changing experience of the sanctuary as well as its role in the wider world. That investigation highlighted not just the range of motivations behind spatial placement but also the range of types of relationships constructed between divinities as a result, as well as the way in which those relationships continued to change over time (cf. Figures 2.1, 2.2, 2.10). Crucially, it also underlined the reciprocal relationship between epigraphic, literary and archaeological evidence, by showing the ways in which the networks of polytheism presented by each could reinforce, contradict or complement one another.