| This research tries to show how the knowledge about the Occident in general and about the southwestern arch specifically was side by side with not only the evolution of the geographical ideas of the Greco-Latin world, but also with the general evolution of Literature, of the Greek and Roman thought and history. The transmission of knowledge about the Western area of the ecumene was parallel to the evolution of the Greco-Latin Literature from the Homeric epic to the specialization of the scientific Literature, the encyclopedia and the mathematical and descriptive Geography. It is obvious that this evolution is also due to historical conditions: the Western world, despite the mythical image created about it because it was located in a liminal and peripheral area of the ecumene, was getting more and more well-known as it was in the process of taking part of this ecumene, which reached its culmination when the Iberian peninsula enters the orbit of the Roman Empire. It is at this time when we have a bigger amount of data about the Southwest, thanks, among other things, to the autoptic presence of Greek historians and geographers in the litoral or even inland.;We have searched, selected, analysed and contextualized the information found in the literary Greco-Latin sources, from Heredotus to Avienus, to historians, geographers or encyclopedists of the stature of Polybius, Artemidorus, Posidonius, Strabo o Plinius or even anonymous works like Antonine itinerary or Ravena's anonymous in a specific area of the ecumene, the southwest of the Iberian peninsula and inside this peninsula, more specifically in the area between, approximately, the Guadiana river, Aracena mountain range, the Guadalquivir river and the coastal section between the mouth of both rivers.;The revision of these texts, with the literary and space contextualization, has been followed, whenever necessary, by a confrontation of archeological and epigraphic data so as to confirm or refuse conclusions withdrawn from the texts and the raised hypotheses. |
