Geographica

He studied under various persons, including Tyrannion, a captive educated Greek and private tutor, who instructed Cicero's two sons.

Cicero says:[9]The geographical work I had planned is a big undertaking...if I take Tyrannion's views too...If one presumes that Strabo acquired the motivation for writing geography during his education, the latter must have been complete by the time of his next visit to Rome in 35 BC at 29 years old.

[8] "Today there are about thirty manuscripts in existence, with a fragmentary palimpsest of the fifth century the earliest (Vaticanus gr.

A Latin translation commissioned by Pope Nicholas V appeared in 1469: this was the edition probably used by Columbus and other early Renaissance explorers.

The first printed Greek edition was the Aldine of 1516, and the first text with commentary was produced by Isaac Casaubon in Geneva in 1587.

Strabo is his own best expounder of his principles of composition:[15]In short, this book of mine should be ... useful alike to the statesman and to the public at large – as was my work on History.

I determined to write the present treatise also; for this work is based on the same plan, and is addressed to the same class of readers, and particularly to men of exalted stations in life.

... in this work also I must leave untouched what is petty and inconspicuous, and devote my attention to what is noble and great, and to what contains the practically useful, or memorable, or entertaining.

... For it, too, is a colossal work, in that it deals with the facts about large things only, and wholes ....An outline of the encyclopedia follows, with links to the appropriate Wikipedia article.