BARBARIANS OR NOT: EPIRUS AND EPIROTES IN STRABO’S GEOGRAPHY
BARBARIANS OR NOT: EPIRUS AND EPIROTES IN STRABO’S GEOGRAPHY

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with geographer Strabo’s description of ancient Epirus and the peoples who inhabited this part of northwestern Greece. For Strabo, not only Epirus was part of Hellas in geographical sense, but even the Epirotes were not Hellenes. Reasons for such an approach of the geographer are being investigated, and sources that Strabo used in his Geography for the description of Epirus and adjacent regions are being analyzed. Explanation for such Strabo’s attitudes towards Epirus as a territory, and the Epirotes as a people should be looked up in several elements, most of all in the infl uence of poetry and particularly the Homeric epics and traditional opinion which considered that Epirus did not belong to Hellas (in spite of the fact that the oldest Hellenic sanctuary and oracle of Zeus at Dodona was geographically situated in Epirus). Infl uences from Greek colonies on the eastern Ionian and Adriatic coast with their views to the mainland from the sea are important as well. One should also have in mind the gloomy state of Epirus in the time when Strabo compiled his work (in the fi rst decades AD, during the reign of emperors Augustus and Tiberius), and which could be best seen in the description of devastated cities and villages which did not recover from the devastation from the period of war and Roman conquest.

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