After the last Ptolemaic dynastic conflicts, the interventions of Caesar and Antony and the addition of Egypt to the Roman world, there was a period of stability and peace. This provided an appropriate political and social situation for established scholars, native or foreign, to work in the famous library of Alexandria. Even though it was now not the only centre of knowledge, it continued to excite the admiration of visitors, and retained the prestige of its Hellenistic past, as well as a paramount role in intellectual activities. Invited by his friend, the prefect of Egypt Aelius Gallus, Strabo had many good reasons to stay there, search the library for rare books and get pieces of information which could be difficult to find elsewhere. It is Strabo's track to information which I presently intend to examine through one case-study. Our task is first to compare variant accounts of the story under consideration and second, to analyse their origin. The purpose of this paper goes a little further, as it also touches on the issue of the place and the time of the compilation of the Geography, particularly of the seventeenth book on Egypt and Libya.

In the seventeenth book of his Geography Strabo tells the story of a courtesan in Egypt called Rhodopis or Doricha. Various tales were told of this courtesan by authors both before and after Strabo.