ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that Strabo's geographical narrative also has what might be termed a "potamological" mode that can engage with the distinctive ways that rivers shape and constrain experiences. It offers a tour of some river narratives in Strabo: Homer's river of Oceanos, the Baetis, the Rhone, the Tiber, the Po, the Euphrates, and the Nile. As Campbell demonstrates, river courses, watersheds, and deltas were major organizing features of ancient Greek and Roman geographical thinking. Rivers create landscapes. Strabo certainly took the memory of his own river Iris, flowing through Amasia by his door, with him in his lifetime of travels: My city is situated in a large deep valley, through which flows the Iris River. Strabo succumbed to the "constant lure" of the Iris and followed its course to the sea where he could embark for his life's journey through the Roman Empire.
