ABSTRACT
Homer had to be part of Strabo's project. He has an emotional claim as well as an intellectual one; he speaks with an unusually personal sensibility when he notes Homer's effect on those who had been nurtured on him since boyhood. Homer was a kind of common currency in which Greek paideia was transacted. Strabo is no passive recorder of local tradition; he is an extremely active interpreter. What distinguishes Strabo from other geographers is the enormous effort he has put into theorising the position of Homer in geography. While acknowledging Homer's emotional claims, for individuals and for communities, he responds to the intellectual ones, and in doing so illuminates the diverse responses Homeric geography had elicited in the Hellenistic period. Homer may be treated as the first of the historians to write on Troy. Of all the models, Strabo's is the most sophisticated. His Cimmerians are the historical people after whom the Cimmerian Bosporus received its name.
