Ancient Greek geography as a phenomenon of culture. Several considerations

Abstract

Representatives of Ancient Greek geographical science generated two main types of texts, which may be characterized as, correspondingly, theoretical and descriptive ones. The greatest author former type of texts was the famous scientist Eratosthenes. But works of such a kind contain almost no historical data, and so they are seldom used by antiquity researchers as a source. The author in the framework of this article is interested first of all in monuments, which belong to two genres inseparable from each other: periegesis and periplus. In periegeseis, more attention is paid to events of the past, as they, while describing cities and places, very often deal with monuments of the history and culture; as to periploi, they show much less interest in the past, as they were written mostly for sailors. In modern literature, periegeseis are often labeled as “ancient guides” and periploi – “ancient pilots”. The most important representative of Greek periegesis was Pausanias. But his work has been studied in detail, and so the article deals mainly with much less known authors (chronologically related to the eras from Hellenistic to Late Roman), such as Heraclides Criticus, Pseudo-Scymnus, Dionysius of Byzantium, Hesychius Illustrius.