Strabo and Greek identity in the age of Augustus: Memory, tradition and ethnographic representation

This is a study of Strabo's conception of the Greeks as an ethnographic subject and the interplay between his ethnographic representation and Greek literary traditions, authorial self-construction and private and communal memory. Six chapters comprise this study. Each of the first four chapters concentrates on the specific themes of self-knowledge, memory and the past, and ethno-cultural identity. The remaining two chapters examine his representations of Greek life in Pontus/Cappadocia and Egypt. Overall, although Greek authors had always played with the boundaries between self and other, Strabo reflects the complicated nature of identity under Rome. He is caught between three (possibly more) worlds, and he self-consciously positions himself between Roman, Greek and Pontic (Greco-Persian) cultures and perspectives. His own multiple and changing identities is reflective of his perception of the state of Greek society in the Roman world. Greek identity is recognized as polyvalent and polysemous, and Strabo relies on multiple, shifting visions of Greekness within the aforementioned binary identities in order to depict the "Greek" experience under Rome. The incongruity between "idealized" and "experienced" identities exposes a crisis of identity, which highlights the themes of historical change and cultural instability and the importance of memory and literature in self-definition and -representation and his selectivity in general. As the ultimate authority as to who is and is not Greek, Strabo intertwines and synthesizes past and present, and relies on the structures, forms and value of memory (in particular the physical and conceptual sites of memory) to define Greek identities on the panhellenic, regional and local levels.