In the seventeen books of Strabo's Geography, the Euxine or Black Sea region receives a lot of attention from the opening chapters onwards. Why so much? The question becomes still sharper when we observe Strabo's awareness of the sheer size of his work. His great text is like a colossal statue, as he puts it. There is an evident authorial pride in its scope and a claim to special quality to match the quantity, but Strabo also shows, sometimes explicitly, a concern to maintain limits: Athens, in particular, cannot be accommodated in all its glories within the work (9.1.16, a nice insight into his criteria for inclusion), while Strabo excuses his extensive treatment of Italy as ‘going into detail on account of the reputation and power of Italy, as far as proper judgement permits (μέχρι τοῦ μετρίου)’ (5.4.11). In approaching Strabo, it may therefore seem perverse to enlarge still further the field of our enquiry. However, for all that, if we are to understand the work in general and Strabo's concern with the Euxine in particular, there is much to be gained from setting the author and his colossus into a still bigger picture.

In what follows I shall first consider the broad context of geography within the tangled issues of Roman and Greek thinking about the Roman empire.