This project began as an attempt to outline the role of women in Strabo's Geography; or, to speak more geographically, it began with a desire to determine the place women occupy in Strabo's account of the world. Given that women (with a few notable exceptions) remain relatively muted in Strabo's overall landscape, the topic initially seemed a straightforward one. Yet in working systematically through the Geography it soon becomes evident that Strabo's attitudes toward gender and sexual difference are both more complicated and, at times, more contradictory than perhaps anticipated. If we demand from the text a consistent and coherent set of values and associations that frame the representation of women, we might be frustrated when, for example, Strabo categorically condemns the rule of women as contrary to civilised practice in one part of his work (3.4.18), while in another part he describes the reign of queen Pythodoris in notably positive terms (12.3.29).

Given the presence of such seeming contradictions in Strabo's lengthy text, my reading seeks not to determine what women meant categorically to Strabo (an impossible project), but to identify the numerous narrative frameworks that intersect in the Geography, frameworks that bring to Strabo's text divergent methods for conceptualising and representing women and sexual difference. My interrogation of sexual difference in Strabo is thus driven by an attempt to explore how women are employed in his text and with reference to what discursive and ideological systems.