Setting the Agenda. The Image of Naples in Strabo’s Geography and other Ancient Literary Sources

The paper offers a new discussion of the most relevant ancient sources relating to Neapolis, showing how Strabo’s fundamental chapter on this city (V 4, 7) contains all the most relevant features which will characterize, in such an enduring fortune, the vision of Neapolis along the whole antiquity. These major feature can be summarized in four points: 1) the question of the origins of the city and of its complex ethnicity; 2) the Greek identity which was continuously claimed by the citizens also during the Roman hegemony; 3) the volcanic nature of soil and landscape, and the consequent porosity of the underground, testified by the famous ‘Seiano cave’ and ‘Crypta Neapolitana’; 4) the idyllic nature of its landscape and its connection with the practice of philosophy, as Virgil’s life witnesses