Strabo’s Geography Emphasizes Urban Centers

Strabo, a Greek from Amasia, wrote for readers who might never leave Smyrna. In seventeen books he walked them through the inhabited world, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Black Sea. What tied it together, he suggested, were cities: Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Corinth—each humming with markets, courts, and shipyards. The empire functioned not as a perfect circle from Rome outward but as a lattice of places, each with its own gravity [4].

He lingers on Alexandria’s harbors and library, on Antioch’s colonnaded avenues along the Orontes, and on Rome’s crowded banks beside the Tiber. The soundscape is mixed—criers in the agora, the creak of oarlocks in the Great Harbor, the rumble of carts on the Via Appia as it runs into Capua. Color splashes in the azure of the eastern Mediterranean and the bronze of harbor braziers at Puteoli.

Strabo’s emphasis on urban nodes anticipates later quantitative views of connectivity. Roads mattered, yes, but sea routes linked grain from Alexandria to Rome faster when the Etesian winds cooperated. A winter sail from Ostia to Narbo took longer than a summer run. Governors scheduled circuits because cost and season, not distance alone, set travel time. Those are precisely the variables ORBIS, Stanford’s model of c. 200 CE connectivity, would later make explicit: 600–750 nodes stitched by roads, rivers, and sea lanes whose costs rise and fall with wind and weather [21][22].

Three places show his method. At Massalia (Marseilles), Greek settlers had laid out orthogonal streets long before Caesar, but under Rome it served as a western relay for goods and ideas. At Rhodes, naval discipline and shipwrights’ skill made it a pivot in Aegean sailing. At Syracuse, the shadow of older empires lingered in theatres and quarries even as Roman administration layered new circuits atop old stone.

Strabo does not theorize like a modern economist. He describes. But in doing so he reveals a spatial constitution: urban centers concentrate administration, cult, and commerce; roads and sea routes connect them; hinterlands feed them. His Rome is not just the Capitoline and the Forum Romanum but a metropolis with roads like nerves and ports as mouths.

By the early Principate, that map had become lived reality. Officials like Pliny the Younger would travel from Bithynia to Rome along predictable corridors; grain ships from Alexandria would time their crossings; letters would ricochet among governors in Asia, Syria, and Africa. Strabo’s pages capture the system early—before Trajan’s column, before the Baths of Caracalla—when the logic was clear and the marble still drying.