Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map reconsidered by Richard A. Talbert (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map reconsidered by Richard A. Talbert Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen Richard A. Talbert, assisted by Nora Harris, Gannon Hubbard, David O’Brien and Graham Shepherd, with a contribution by Martin Steinmann. Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map reconsidered. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2010. Pp. xviii + 357. CDN $91.95. ISBN 9780521764803. Students of the classical world are accustomed to classify the texts and artifacts that form the basis of our research by type, genre, style, material or period, into neat categories defined and refined by generations of tidy-minded scholars. The document forming the subject of this book, however, eludes all attempts at categorization. It combines elements of text and image, road map and road-book, yet it is neither one nor the other. Its purpose is disputed: was it intended for journey planning or as ornamentation? Its original dimensions are unknown, since part of the scroll had already been lost before the present copy, measuring 6.94 meters in length by 0.33 meters in height, was produced at some time around the year 1200. According to the view of Theodor Mommsen and others, the original was derived from the wall map of Agrippa (late first century bc) while Emily Albu has recently argued that it was compiled as late as the ninth century ad. Today, the document is formally known as the Codex—which it is not—Vindobonensis 324, slightly less formally as the Tabula Peutingeriana after its onetime owner, Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547). Nothing is known about the original creator(s); Konrad Miller’s attempt to identify him as the Castorius cited by the Ravenna cosmographer earned the ridicule of many later scholars, including the authors of the present volume (133-34). Given the many uncertainties surrounding the Tabula Peutingeriana, not to mention the acerbity of the scholarly debates it has engendered, Richard Talbert and his collaborators deserve our admiration for embarking on a ten-year voyage of discovery through the world of the anonymous cartographer(s). The present volume is one product of this endeavor; another is an online [End Page 145] database, to which appendices 7 through 9 (196-286) provide a user’s guide. The larger part of the book is devoted to the origin, reception and purpose of what the authors call the Peutinger Map (henceforth PM). This is in itself a programmatic statement. Whereas most recent studies have interpreted the PM as an itinerarium pictum or route diagram, this book returns to the earlier view that the PM is a true work of cartography, i.e. an attempt at depicting the earth’s surface as a graphic image. The chapters follow an inverse chronological sequence, the first and longest (10-72) tracing the modern history of the PM since its acquisition by Konrad Peutinger and supplemented by appendices 1-6. This is followed by a brief, but rich chapter (73-85) on the medieval copy: its material, its paleography, date and place of origin (co-authored with Martin Steinmann). In Chapters 3 on “design and character” (86-122) and 4 on “recovery of the original from the surviving copy” (123-32), we move closer to Antiquity and by Chapter 5, “The Original Map” (133-57) we have reached the late Roman world in which the archetype of the PM was created. The concluding chapter discusses “the map’s place in Classical and Medieval cartography”. The book offers a number of new insights and provocative ideas, especially in Chapter 5 where Richard Talbert attempts to reconstruct the format and context of the PM’s archetype. The majority opinion among scholars holds that our twelfth-century copy reproduces a map of the later fourth century whose peculiarly elongated shape was dictated by the need to fit it onto a papyrus scroll. Talbert does not question the late fourth-century date of the version transmitted to posterity, but contends that this in its turn was based on an earlier archetype, a wall map produced under the Tetrarchy and probably displayed in the apse of an imperial audience chamber. He hypothesizes (146) that it would be natural for the apse of an aula to possess not just one...