Strabo (ca. 64 BC - ca. 24 AD) was a Greek geographer living in Asia Minor during the early years of the Roman Empire; he is renowned for his Geographica (or Geographia), one of the great works of geography to survive from the classical period. In the book, Strabo defined geography, discussed the underpinning mathematics, talked about comparable earlier works and earlier maps, and then proceeded to describe the regions of the Roman Empire, from his own travels and from sources that he consulted. M
The final version, as known today, was completed about the time of his death, but the text appears to have been composed over a considerable span of years, possibly commenced at the time of his first visit to Rome in 44 BC. Numbers of manuscript copies survive, and a number of printed editions of the text appeared in the sixteenth century.
This version was edited and translated by Willem Xylander (Wilhelm Holzman; 1532–1576), a highly regarded scholar of Greek. It was printed by Sebastian Henricpetri (1546-1627); he was the son of the printer Heinrich Petri, in turn stepson and successor of Sebastian Münster. This explains his access to maps originally prepared for Münster’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia … and for his father’s edition of Johannes Honter’s … De Cosmographiæ Rudimentis … (1561), which he used to illustrate this text. This copy is a rare variant of the parallel text edition, omitting on the title-page any reference to Xylander. It lacks three leaves compared with the collation of the standard version, possibly the translator’s preface.
No identifiable copy of this printing has been located on COPAC or KVT, but there are two possible copies (in total); the overwhelming number of copies are of the standard version.
