Pomponius Mela: Geography of the World

This volume offers a fresh translation and the first English-language commentary of Pomponius Mela, an Iberian intellectual who wrote a three-book geographical description of the Roman world under the emperor Claudius. The translation is as faithful to the original Latin as possible to give the Latinless reader a real taste of Mela's style.

In the detailed commentary, Irby highlights Mela's sources (Herodotus, Sallust, and Caesar, among others) and stylistic influences, including Vergil, Ovid, Livy, and Horace; she examines Mela’s entertaining digressions into ethnography, paradoxography, and mythology; and she offers at least one interesting or quirky detail about most places (insofar as independent information exists), the sort of information that Mela would want his readers to know or the bizarre details that would have delighted him. Irby shows how Mela reworked his evidence and balanced his identity as an Iberian (for example by promoting his Phoenician heritage) and a Roman citizen (by emulating, especially, Sallust and Caesar). Finally, the commentary is keyed to the Barrington Atlas. Readers are further aided in finding their way through Mela’s world with three maps by the Ancient World Mapping Center and two schematic maps representing the author’s view of the world that he was describing.