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INTRODUCTION
In the study of the geography of southern Spain, we must always take account of Claudius Ptolemy.1 An erudite Alexandrian, he tried to provide data to allow the graphic representation of the world as he knew it. His attempt with regard to Baetica and other areas has often been criticized for its inaccuracies which do, indeed, abound. However, a closer look at his mapping of Baetica will provide a deeper appreciation of his methodology, the problems he faced, and what he accomplished.
PREDECESSORS
Ptolemy is only one of many of Greeks and Romans interested in Baetica's geography. A more general understanding of that geography is based primarily upon three major sources as well as on a number of minor ones, which we need to survey briefly before turning to Ptolemy himself.
The Greek geographer Strabo2 wrote an account designed to be a vade mecum for imperial officials sent out to the corners of the Imperium; the material was composed about A.D. 25 but drew, of course, on earlier material, some of it dating to the period before the Romans had conquered the peninsula completely. Pliny the Elder also wrote extensively about southern Spain in his Historia Naturalis, published about A.D. 70.3 He, too, used earlier material, most importantly, Agrippa's world map which was composed under Augustus, and a compilation made under that same emperor of all the towns and tribes of the imperium. The loss of Agrippa's map is particularly regrettable; using Greek geographers, Roman road itineraries and peripli (coastal sailing charts) he created a monumental geographical achievement which was installed after his death in the porticus Vipsania.4 The Roman M. Terentius Varrò, who served in Spain in the middle of the first century B.C., wrote in his Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum about the Iberian peninsula: in book twelve of that work he treated geography. Pliny used his work extensively, as did Pomponius Mela, a minor geographer of the Augustan period who wrote about the area.5 Because his basic source is Varrò, Mela gives little new information once Pliny's notices have been digested and correlated.
Other sources add information from time to time. Although much geographical material survives from his history, it is particularly lamentable that book 34 of Polybius, which was a...