How did they do it? Late republican authors like Livy and Cicero, and the Greek Polybius slightly earlier, tried to make sense of Rome’s acquisition and maintenance of empire through the prism of Greek political theory about the ideal constitution of a city-state, but such reductionist analysis didn’t help much. Long before the republic died in an orgy of civil war, Roman armies had conquered territory on an unprecedented scale, and you don’t move armies from one end of the earth to the other without some sense of how far away the ends of the earth might be. Its practical cartographic value, however, is nil.Īnd yet the Roman Empire did bestride the world (or a fair chunk of it). It shows us routes (and sometimes distances) from point to point, and it illustrates Rome’s sense of its world-bestriding dominance.
#Map roman arausio series#
A series of itineraries stitched together in a roll 22 feet long but only a foot wide, it not only muddles the cardinal directions, but compresses north-south distances while elongating east-west like a funhouse mirror. The one Roman world map to survive (in a medieval copy known as the Peutinger Table) doesn’t even look like a map. The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, now the gold standard for historical cartography, shows us an ancient geography that the ancients couldn’t have conceived of themselves. Romans could measure long distances fairly accurately, but not large areas, let alone represent them on a map. But however great their technical and tactical know-how, they weren’t so good at conceptualising space at the strategic or geographic level. Romans excelled in both theory and praxis at the topographic level, as could be seen with Caesar’s amazing siegeworks at Alesia in France. It’s worth noting that while the vast bulk of Latin literature has disappeared without a trace, the corpus of the agrimensores survived and runs to more than five hundred pages in the standard edition. But the Roman habit of rectilinear survey was much more ingrained than that: enlisted gromatici laid out the marching camps that armies constructed every evening while on campaign, each one the model of a miniature city, with the commander’s tent or praetorium the fixed point from which the camp’s four quadrants would be traced. Wherever the republican state planted colonies of discharged soldiers – as at Orange – a survey was needed so that the town could be planned and the countryside parcelled out, indigenous inhabitants having been summarily dispossessed in favour of their Roman masters. Roman agrimensores (‘land measurers’, also known as gromatici after their key tool, the groma) were highly skilled surveyors. How they managed it is clear enough at the technical level.
The density and detail of Roman land administration was unlike anything else in antiquity, or in the premodern world as a whole. It was engraved on the orders of the Emperor Vespasian, who wanted to reclaim public lands lost to private encroachment since the colony’s foundation by Julius Caesar. Roman milestones and boundary markers are staples of dusty epigraphic collections everywhere, while in the Musée d’Orange (Orange was Roman Arausio) there is something even more impressive: a land register in stone, the fragments of which were found in 1949, recording all the plots of land (rectilinear, naturally) between Orange and Nice. Anyone who has flown into Venice from the west will have noticed the unusually rectilinear field systems (Google Earth will show you too), a legacy of Roman surveyors two millennia ago, and far from unique: Roman conquerors and colonists left this type of centuriation behind wherever they went. T he Romans were formidably good at organising space.
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