The shape of things before
Peter Levi
GREEK AND ROMAN MAPS by 0. A. W. Mike
Thames & Hudson, E18
All my life I have longed for a proper, reliable book about Greek and Roman maps, the evidence being scattered and bizarre. For a time, a few years ago, the lumps of a particularly knobbly Greek coin were thought to be a relief map of part of Western Asia. The geography of the Prom- etheus of Aeschylus is as intriguing as it is improbable. The Tin Islands could be anywhere from the Scilly Isles (probably) to the Hebrides. I once set off inspired by a lecture on historical geography by Profes- sor Hawkes to track down the Greeks between Bordeaux and Biarritz, an area where they left no trace whatsoever in those days.
The uncrowned king of this subject is an American scholar of monumental patience and ingenuity, whose highly distinguished life-work it was, called Aubrey Diller. It requires considerable cunning to track down all his writings and I fear Professor Dilke has missed some of them. One of Diller's principal contributions was to de- monstrate once and for all that the so- called ancient tradition of the maps to be found in manuscripts of Ptolemy does not really go further back than the Renaiss- ance. Not that no ancient maps exist. There is even a mediaeval one of Britain in an Oxford manuscript of the Notitia Digni- tatum, but it is more beautiful than accu- rate. Genuinely early evidence is thin on the ground.
Professor Dilke wins my personal sym- pathy by adducing a bronze model of a sheep's liver, inscribed in third-century BC Etruscan with the names of gods and their zones of influence. This has always been one of those curiosities I was most anxious to track down, though I failed to find it in Piacenza, where everyone claims it is. Still, as he says, it 'certainly has some bearing on orientation, though perhaps not on map- ping'. He also produces a drawing of the Orb of Crates, an Alexandrian terrestrial orb intended as a coherent illustration of Homer's views about geography. Natural- ly, Crates was unsuccessful since Homer's views do not cohere. He was one in a long list of heroic minds that assumed the world was symmetrical. Of course, in so far as an orb is symmetrical, they turned out to be right, and it was work on the ancient Greek geographers that led Columbus to the discovery of America.
The pleasing wildness of this subject and its stray delights do not deter Professor Dilke from an admirable sobriety and restraint. One notes with regret what scholars pressed for time will note with relief, that he spends little space on the conjectures of the early Greeks or the Babylonians. Eratosthenes, a foolish poly- math who centred the world on Rhodes and plotted simplified continents more or less symmetrically around that point, de- tains us a very few pages. By page 39 we are down to Roman mapping before Agrippa. The birds of geography spread their wings only as the darkness began to gather. Britain, for example, was thought by Eratosthenes to be a triangle with its tip tilting westwards. Caesar thought it tilted eastwards. The Augustans thought it was perfectly upright. Tacitus gives it the shape of a tailor's dummy with no head or limbs, but waisted and skirted.
Route-maps, of course, are another mat- ter. They are relatively abundant, and so are detailed plans and representations of places, including the city of Rome. Profes- sor Dilke produces several pieces of mediaeval mapping, including the famous ninth-century plan of the monastery at St Gallen. He even gives us a bit of the Hereford Cathedral Mappa Mundt. another of my favourite objects in the world. No map is more enchanting or bizarre and the way the light goes out when they think you have seen it for long enough adds to its mysteriousness. But I do not really think it belongs in this book, where- as the stone fragments of the Forma Urbis Romae do, and go unillustrated. As for route-maps, only one who has used them over wild and otherwise unmapped country will know how unreliable one should ex- pect them to be. All the same, knowledge was written down somehow, and did survive. The overgrown Roman roads would not have got Harold to Hastings so swiftly without at least a route-map. The big trouble occurs when you try to use the coastal equivalent particularly if you do so in the dark. It is not always easy to tell Land's End from the Scilly Isles unless you can read the coastal lights. Pausanias (neglected here) gets badly confused threading through some islands not far from Athens. He has no idea what direction his ship is pointing in, and if two place names on the coast get misread or wrongly listed, he is as utterly lost as one has so often been.
Professor Dilke is excellent on ancient land-surveying. Difficulties could arise, be- cause Demosthenes argues somewhere ab- out whether a particular bit of land is a private garden, a public road, or the bed of a river, but the Romans made strides. Still, they never achieved a reliable map of the world, so it is small wonder they failed to govern it. Perhaps conquest has to come first, as the military origins of the Ordn- ance Survey suggest. He is full and lucid on late route-maps and road charts, down to the pilgrimage maps of Matthew Paris. His treatment of maps in art form, particularly in mosaic, is a brief, sensible introduction to the subject, but thrilling. All the same, I do not really agree with him that Dionysius Periegetes 'is capable of sounding poetic'. Enthusiasm for the ancient world should not tempt us to desert those civilised standards that the Renaissance somehow wrested from its ruins.
Professor Dilke's great advantage is his comprehensiveness. Everything is treated and ground into the flour of knowledge with equal consistency. This was not perhaps intended to be a very diverting book, which it is, but just a scholarly work of reference, a proper account of the subject, which it also is. I was sorry not to see Avi-Yonah in the bibliography. And I would have liked more about Tacitus, more about Alexander the Great, and more about deliberate exploration and how it was recorded.
Previous page
