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INTRODUCTION
STRABO OF AMASEIA LIVED in an era of radical transformation, from the midfirst century В.С.Е. through the beginning of Tiberius' reign.1 His only extant work, the Geography, chronicles the expansion of the oikoumene, the known and inhabited world, under Roman hegemony. Although it does not have a prominent place in the Geography, Strabo's own family history unfolds as a micro version of this master narrative. His ancestors belonged to the highest circles of the Pontic court, while Strabo himself moved successfully among the political elite at Rome. Strabo's father was born in the kingdom of Pontus, Strabo himself in the Roman province Bithynia-Pontus, newly created by Pompey the Great.
Efforts to establish the biography of the historical Strabo used to dominate the scholarship on the Geography. However, in her 1997 article "In Search of the Author of Strabo's Geography," Katherine Clarke reconciled Strabo the historical person with his literary project by arguing that the different facets of the man could be spatially mapped onto his narrative. The figure of Strabo encompasses his Pontic roots, his intellectual attachment to the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and his connections at Rome.2 My article will be concerned with the first of these three areas.
I will investigate Strabo's presentation of the history of his family and of his ancestral city as. an example of how an individual (Strabo) and a micro community (his family) situate their own narrative in a larger historical framework. In the first part of this article I discuss how Strabo presents the recent history of his home country Pontus and his hometown Amaseia to show the connections between this local history and the thrust of the work as a whole. Next, I discuss how Strabo's family history unfolds in the Geography over the course of several wars between Pontus and Rome. I suggest that Strabo based this narrative, at least in part, on accounts transmitted orally within his family.3 In the third and last section I compare Strabo's account of his ancestor Dorylaus the Younger, a close friend of Mithridates Eupator, with evidence from other sources. This episode is central to understanding how the family and Strabo himself shaped the narrative of the events of the wars...