Although an aim of BMCR is to inform the academic community of new works, the title here reviewed is far from new, being instead a “nouvelle édition revue et mise à jour” of La Description de la Terre Habitée de Denys d’Alexandrie, printed by Albin Michel in 1990. Plenty was written about it in the aftermath of its original publication.
I myself agree for the most part with Alain Musset’s opinions, expressed in 1992 with great clarity and insight (and I apologise if I repeat some of his points of view here).[1] Musset notes, among other things, that “the merit of Christian Jacob lies in showing, in a long introduction that is both scholarly and passionate, how this poem is important in the history of science and (at the same time) makes us appreciate its intrinsic value.”
I will therefore centre my text on how the present new edition alters the original 1990 printing, for I do not know if, much less how, subsequent reissues changed the text.
But let me start with a few words on Dionysius of Alexandria, a character badly known ever by the majority of Hellenists. Nicknamed Periegetes (today we’d perhaps call him a travel guide), Dionysius described in 1187 hexameter verses the world known to the Romans governed by Hadrian (the inhabited earth, or οἰκουμένη), when the Roman Empire was at the peak of its expansion. As far as it can be inferred, Dionysius was not an intrepid traveller such as Pytheas of Massalia, and most likely he never crossed the lands he presents. On the contrary: despite being not much more than a name, Dionysius seems to have been no more than a schoolmaster who imposed himself the task of systematizing the geographic knowledge accumulated by earlier predecessors. He was what Monteiro Lobato would call a “viajante de gabinete” (“study-room traveller”).
This mixture of lack of first-hand knowledge of the places “visited” with a systematizing zeal explains in part why the world described by him resembles a map (an aerial view), and why Dionysius feels the necessity of populating his verses with characters from Greek mythology (some of which are so obscure that we would not recognize them were it not for Jacob’s generous notes). All this (I agree once more with Musset) makes Dionysius’ poem, despite its shortness, “assez indigeste … superficiel, naïf, alourdi de références et de digression”.
Dionysius gives unequal attention to the different territories, betraying a certain taste for exoticism when he devotes almost half of the poem to Asia and ignores the many Greek cities best known to his presumptive reading public.
Despite its shortcomings, Dionysius’ Description of the Inhabited Word keeps much of the fascination of traveling through a world without satellites, mobiles, and Instagram, and will possibly please specialists and general readers alike, Jacob’s evident enthusiasm for it being a great encouragement to reading. One should also notice that Dionysius continued to be used as a sort of geography manual well into the 17th century, when the great navigations had expanded the European knowledge of our planet.
Now, on the new edition of Christian Jacob’s book.
The first and most noticeable alteration is in its cover presentation. The first edition prints Christian Jacob’s name as of its author, followed by the title La Description de la Terre Habitée de Denys d’Alexandrie ou la Leçon de Géographie. We could very well suppose it to be on Dionysius’s poem, its genre and reception. Now the cover presents Dionysius as the author, followed by the title La Description de la Terre Habitée. Jacob’s name appears on the cover page only, preceded by the terms “introduit, traduit et annoté.” Now the assumption is that we are before an annotated edition of the poem. Interestingly enough, given the quality and specificities of the translation and the volume of paratext that surrounds it, both suppositions are right in a way.
As for the textual changes, they expand as far as possible our knowledge of author and work. For instance, in the first paragraph of the Introduction Générale, where the 1990 edition limited itself to mentioning some acrostics in the poem that informed us that Dionysius was from Alexandria and a contemporary of Hadrian, the new one deals with his filiation as transmitted by Byzantine scholia and makes an interesting inference about the identity of the poet’s father, a grammarian who according to the Suda was active under Nero. In changes of such kind the bibliographical update can be noticeable. In fact, in this very paragraph Jacob makes use of unpublished material, in this case of Patrick Counillon’s “notes de travail.”
More curiously, at least once I noticed that Jacob changed a neutral expression of the 1990 edition (“Le manuel se révéla efficace…”, p. 13) for one that expresses some kind of critical judgment (“Cet étrange manuel de géographie se révéla efficace…”, p. 12).
As for Jacob’s translation itself, it seems to be identical to the one originally published; at least I did not find any changes in the random passages compared.
For those who have not read the original edition, the book is divided in three parts. The first one presents the poem itself and ends with an annotated prose translation by Jacob himself. Just like the first edition and other volumes of the La Roue à Livres collection, this one is also monolingual, lacking the original Greek. The second part edits Bénigne Saumaise’s verse translation (in 2740 Alexandrines). The third and last part presents a sort of “modernization” of the Description… by Edward Wells (xvii c.), incorporating lands unknown to Dionysius, like the Americas and China. Each part has its own distinctive introduction, notes and bibliography.
The number of notes to the prose translation (276), to Saumaise (69), and to Wells (51) was not altered, and I confess I did not compare the new edition to the first one in this regard to see if there are any changes in their redaction. The map representing the world as described by Dionysius, present in 1990, is also reproduced here.
At least three other translations of the Description of the Inhabited Word were published since 1990, two in Italian and one in English. [2] They are all very good (and bilingual), but Christian Jacob’s work remains essential and necessary to those interested not only in Dionysius and his poem, but also in geographical reports from classical antiquity and their later reception.
Notes
[1] Alain Musset’s review can be read here (https://www.persee.fr/doc/ahess_0395-2649_1992_num_47_2_279053_t1_0450_0000_001).
[2] Dionisio di Alessandria: Descrizione della Terra abitata, ed. Eugenio Amato (2005), Dionysius Periegetes: Description of the Known World, ed. J.L. Lightfoot, (2014), and Dionisio Periegeta: Descrizione dell’ecumene, ed. K. Lodesani (2022). After publication of this review, Graham Shipley pointed out the existence of one other translation of Dionysius overlooked by me, for which I am very grateful: Khan, Yumna Z. N. (2002), ‘A commentary on Dionysius of Alexandria’s Guide to the Inhabited World, 174–382’, Ph.D. thesis. University College London. http://discovery.ucl.