F.E. ROMER What is the Genre of khôrographia?

The Greeks recognized three genres of geographic writing--topographia, khôrographia, and gêographia--in theory, distinguishable from one another as the written technical descriptions, respectively, of a single place (topos), an entire region (khôros), or the whole world (gê). But the exact distinction between khôrographia and gêographia has proved elusive. Specific passages and considerations in various writers may be called chorographic, but such passages do not parallel the genre. A remark by Vitruvius (8.2.6) illustrates one level of the difficulty but, taken together, Pomponius Mela's Chorographia and the prefaces to Lucian's True History (1.1-4) and Ptolemy's Gêographia (1.1) identify the real boundaries of the genre. Mela's title plays on two meanings ("map" and "chorographic writing"). The book is its own map, and the narrative is a fictive voyage around the orbis situs (oikoumenê). The reader visits the coasts of the known world and meets, on its outermost edges, the creatures of mythology (Hyperboreans, Goat-Pans, etc.); the boundary between fact and fiction is flexible. Lucian both spoofs chorographers and, like Mela, patterns his novella on the voyage that is essential to two chorographic types. The true periplous recounts an actual sea voyage so that others may duplicate the journey; the only surviving literary chorographia (in Latin) describes a fictional voyage around the orbis situs. Ptolemy rejected chorography as unscientific, despite its utility for locating rivers (cp. Vitruvius). The voyage conveys the sense of pragmatism that benefits commerce and travel. But Mela, Lucian, and Ptolemy identify chorography as the description of either a real or an imagined voyage, which raises (a) the problem of the genre's claims to truth, (b) longstanding issues of lies and fiction in ancient literature, and (c) the general question of how, in practice, geographic writing related to the scientific standards embraced by Ptolemy.