The contention of this book is that the development of Greek literature was motivated by the need to endow political geography with a sense of purposeful structure. It views Greek literature as a crucial factor in the cultural production of space and Greek geography as a crucial factor in the production of literary meaning. Its focus is on the idealizing images that Greek literature created of three spatial patterns of power distribution—a decentralized network of aristocratically governed communities (archaic Greece), a democratic city controlling an empire (classical Athens), and a microcosm of Greek culture located on foreign soil, ruled by quasi-divine royals, and populated by immigrants (Ptolemaic Alexandria). The book draws connections between the formation of these idealizing images and the emergence of such literary modes of meaning-making as the authoritative communication of the truth, the dialogic encouragement to search for the truth on one’s own, and the abandonment of transcendental goals for the sake of cultural memory and/or aesthetic pleasure. Its readings of such canonical Greek authors as Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians, Thucydides, Plato, Callimachus, and Theocritus show that the pragmatics of Greek literature (the sum total of the ideological, cognitive, and emotional effects that it seeks to produce) is, in essence, always a pragmatics of space—i.e. that there is a strong correlation between the historically conditioned patterns of political geography and the changing mechanisms whereby Greek literature enabled its recipients to make sense of their world.