Such was the reputation which Strabo enjoyed among the later Greeks, that he was always simply called _the_ geographer (Eustathius never quotes him by any other name), just as Aristotle was simply styled _the_ philosopher. It is well known that he was a native of Amasia or Amasea, in a distant part of Pontus, and although his birth-place was not a Greek town, he seems to have belonged to a Greek family. He was born in the reign of Augustus, and wrote under Tiberius. We see, from his work, that he was one of those men who have not chosen their pursuit with a due regard to their real natural talents: for by profession he was a speculative philosopher, a Stoic, while in reality he had a genuine historical mind, and a true historical tact. He composed two great works, one of which has perished in such an inconceivable manner, that I very much doubt whether it was ever published. It was a continuation of Polybius which he wrote, because he was dissatisfied with that of Posidonius, and the task was one for which he was most eminently qualified. His geography is an excellent work, and considering the loss of that of Eratosthenes, it is invaluable, for he was a man of great judgment; but unfortunately it has not come down to us quite entire. Until a late period of the middle ages, it existed only in a single manuscript, which is probably now at Paris; its outward damages seem to indicate that it is the source from which all the later MSS. were taken. It is a remarkable fact, that several such MSS. of Greek authors, from which all others are derived, are still in existence, so that it is superfluous to collate the others. I may mention, for example, Athenaeus and the orator Aristides; the MS. of the latter is at Florence, the library of which city appears to have been particularly rich in such original MSS., and it is possible, that they were obtained directly from Constantinople. Eustathius and Stephanus of Byzantium still had complete copies of Strabo. This geographer has done all that his materials enabled him to do: the whole of geography, so far as it was known in his time, is laid down in his book, and that not only the contemporary geography, but also that of earlier ages with especial reference to the illustration of the poets, particularly Homer, whence from the very beginning we often meet with digressions, which do not seem to us to be in exact proportion to the whole work. We may assert that until the fourth and fifth century, the geography of the Romans did not extend beyond what had been known to Strabo; he did not indeed possess the information about Germany and Britain, which we find in Tacitus; but, generally speaking, we may say that, with few exceptions, geography during several centuries made no progress. In Ptolemy we see that the knowledge of the East, especially of India, had been advanced and extended by merchants, while in Strabo the knowledge about those countries is rather limited, commerce not having