ABSTRACT
Strabo's account of the city of Rome is one of the most striking set-pieces of the Geography, but also one of the most puzzling. The exposition, in its correct place in the geographical sequence of the work, is arresting for a number of reasons. Descriptions of cities are not very common in ancient texts, even geographical ones. For all its fame, Rome is almost never the subject of a detailed literary presentation. Strabo's survey of Italy proceeds people by people and here the Sabines are presented first, and then the Latins. The gate in Rome from which the viae Salaria and Nomentana begin, Porta Collina, is the threshold also of evocation of the physical reality of the city. Augustan is cultic evocation of a supposed boundary for Rome's first territory. Augustus would have warmed to the point that like Sparta, Rome had needed to depend on valour more than fortifications: 'walls are not defences for men, but men for walls'.
