This is a work that goes beyond the geographical. Although the author deals with geography and cartography as such in chapter 7, the work mainly analyzes the geographical information transmitted by all kinds of artistic material, mainly from the imperial period and located in Rome itself. The geography in most of the examples compiled has an intention that is more evocative than descriptive, transmits real landscapes, but above all awakens the imagination, suggests connections, frightens, baffles or even reassures. All these so-called “geographical products” (p. 148; 226) convey images, but also values and ideas. This approach goes far beyond the traditional perspective of ancient geography, which tends to focus on literary sources of a historiographical or geographical nature from an ecumenical point of view.
To understand the approach precisely, it must be said that the author starts from such a broad definition of map or geographical space (see p. 1), that any material artifact that allows us to “visualize or understand the world” can be analyzed in terms of a real or figurative, allusive or representative “geographical product”.
The work consists of a preface, nine chapters and an appendix of personal memories and sensations about the author’s walks through Rome. Preface. 1. Mind maps; 2. Strangers in a strange land; 3. Rome in Rome; 4. An endless river; 5. Staged designs; 6. Landscape and desire; 7. An invisible ruler; 8. Body maps; 9. Moving away from the pulse; 10. Walking towards the Empire. Appendix.
Most of the bibliography tends to be placed at the beginning of each chapter, but little use is made of it in the development of the argument, except in the case of very specific titles. The excessive dependence on English-language bibliography is not at all surprising: it is a common ailment in the European humanities.
What is surprising is that the author ignores a very long tradition of studies on Greco-Roman geography written in other languages, especially in French and Italian, which he should have consulted. Essentially, only those that have been translated into English are cited, such as Nicolet’s classic work: Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (University of Michigan, 1991).
Let me briefly describe the content of the work:
In the preface, Ferris discusses what should be understood by “geography” and “geographical product,” in the sense indicated above.
Chapter 1 deals with objects as disparate in chronological and cultural terms as the protohistoric map of Bedolina (Lombardy, Italy; 6th-4th centuries BC), the Etruscan liver of Piacenza (Italy; 4th century BC), the reliefs of the Ara Pacis (13-9 BC) or the decoration of the breastplate of Augustus of Prima Porta (1st century AD). According to Ferris, what they all have in common is that they are ways of visualizing knowledge and generators of identity.
Chapter 2 highlights how, in the time of Augustus, a whole geography of memory was developed that connected with the origins (the discovery of the House of Romulus, of the ship of Aeneas, etc.). At the same time, based on the poems of Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, a popular topography of the city of Rome was developed, reflecting a very different identity of ordinary people.
Chapter 3 reviews the city of Rome as a geographical product in itself: a city built as a continuous reminder of the pride of being Roman and of the effects of Romanitas through monuments evoking victories. This was the case through a continuous process of monumentalization during the Republic (in the hands of triumphant generals) and the Empire (promoted by the imperial house): forums, temples, stadiums, and arches. These are then repeated and disseminated in numismatic representation.
Chapter 4 is dedicated to rivers, which mark borders and symbolize wealth, but also personalize territories. The Tiber and the Nile are the most important and the most represented, but other provincial border rivers are also represented. This will be taken up again in chapter 6.
Chapter 5 is dedicated to two subjects: Roman landscape painting in Campania and the decoration of Trajan’s Column. The first represents an idealized and impersonal nature; the second symbolizes the landscape of war and victory over untamed and wild nature.
Chapter 6, focusing on the Palestrina mosaic, returns to one of the most frequently represented rivers: the Nile and the landscapes of the Nile. Egypt is the ultimate expression of the ancestral, the exotic and the exuberant and, as such, the most desirable place to dominate and/or represent in an idealized way among all possible “colonial landscapes”, that is to say, the landscapes of the conquered provinces[1].
Chapter 7 is, in my opinion, the one that is most clearly explained because it focuses on a single topic: Roman cartography as a manifestation of power. It brings together as examples the maps that were displayed in triumphal processions to monumental maps such as those mentioned by Varro in the Temple of Cybele on the Esquiline Hill, Pliny’s account of Agrippa’s map in the Portico of Vipsania, the remains of the Severan Forma Urbis on the walls of the Temple of Peace, the Tabula Peutingeriana, the Madaba mosaic and the map in Artemidorus’ Papyrus. All of them were products to be exhibited in public. As well as reaffirming Roman control of the world, their contemplation stimulated the cartographic imagination.
Chapter 8 is dedicated to the representation of barbarism as the maximum expression of otherness. But, specifically, it will refer to the feminization of barbarism and of the barbarian. It will talk about the female representation of the provinces, of the violent barbarian of the Arch of Marcus Aurelius or of the conquered barbarian represented in the form of a woman (as in the case of the reliefs of the Sebasteion of Aphrodisias). With the feminization of barbarism or of the conquered territories, the difference between the center and the periphery is accentuated even more and the civilizing character of Rome is emphasized even more.
Chapter 10 presents a synthesis of all the author’s ideas. The fundamental idea is that the dissemination of geographical knowledge about Roman topography was a carefully calculated exercise in power, involving several levels, from the real to the allusive. Its purpose was to explain what it meant to be Roman and, above all, what it implied: to dominate the world. In fact, it is true that although the empire ended up being multicultural, the political ideology was always Greco-Roman and this had to be reinforced. This is the ideological background to many works of art that use geography in an evocative way. However, the Roman public was not a blank canvas: reception depended on their common store of knowledge, their skills and their interests, so that an object could be seen in many different ways (and even more so with the passage of time), escaping from immediate political action. In short:
“The spatial and visual arts created a link between architecture, the culture of travel in all its forms, the history of visual art and its well-established tropes, and memory and cartography in their broadest and most non-literal sense. The result was a mixture of utopias, centered on imperial harmony, and dystopias, related to conquest and slavery. The drive towards possession and domination created an eroticism of knowledge, a spatial curiosity” (pp. 248-49).
As history is a scientific discipline, there are two principles to which a historian working as such must always adhere: clarity and soundness of approach, methodology and discourse, even if the reader disagrees in part or in whole. The book is anything but clear: written in the form of a story, it constantly changes subject, jumps, adds, repeats, goes back and forth on the same argument, rambles and offers literary and fleeting opinions. I can honestly say that it is difficult to read, let alone consult, possibly because it is conceived more as a literary essay than as an academic work.
In methodological terms, Ferris makes an important mistake: at no point does he explain the reasons that led him to choose certain monuments or archaeological pieces and not others. This is even more necessary because many of them are pieces from very different periods or exist in museums and were found without archaeological context. To give just one example, to discuss the Bedolina map, the Etruscan liver from Piacenza, the reliefs of the Ara Pacis or the decoration of Augustus’ breastplate from Prima Porta in the same argument and in the same chapter, it is important to explain well why they should be brought together. Otherwise, the conclusion lacks a scientific basis. Here, it gives the impression that they have been chosen at random and that the resulting ‘mental map’ is more that of the author himself than the mental map of a Roman citizen of the imperial era.
In short, the idea a priori is very suggestive and worth developing. But the method of selecting the material is highly questionable in some chapters and the conclusions very confusing.
Translated by David Wilson
Notes
[1] The author asks the following question to explain the spread of Nilotic painting in the second century BCE, just over a century before the Roman conquest of Egypt: “Were these earlier images political statements of a kind: soft power depictions of a future target for exploitation and military and political takeover?’ (p. 110). It deserves no more comment than this: that question is pure history-fiction!