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

The Peutinger Map is a cartographic prodigy. It compresses the Roman Empire and parts of Asia into a ribbon 6.72 meters long but only 0.33 meters tall. The mapmaker removed open water, turned some landmasses on their sides, and squashed others almost flat. What are scholars to do with a map, “si peu correcte et si bizarre,” in the disparaging words of Johann Casimir von Häffelin (36)? Adding to the difficulties, the map we have is a medieval copy, several steps removed from an ancient original. And yet, this is the only map of the Roman world to survive from antiquity; it is enormously important.

Richard Talbert has now produced the first full-length study of the Peutinger map in more than ninety years, and with it the first ever photographic presentation of the map in color. Uniquely qualified as the editor of the Barrington Atlas, he draws deeply on Brian Harley’s and David Woodward’s insistence on understanding maps within their own cultural contexts. In five narrative chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, nine appendices, endnotes, bibliography, index and gazetteer, and extensive online resources, Talbert makes, I think, four major contributions to the scholarship on this map and to ancient cartography.

First (chap. 1), Talbert provides an archaeology of the scholarship since the map’s rediscovery around 1500, when it first appears in the record as a bequest to the humanist Konrad Peutinger. Talbert deploys an impressive breadth and depth of research (cf. apps. 1–4 and 6); inter alia, he restores the reputation of Von Scheyb’s mid-eighteenth-century edition. Especially striking is his demonstration of the massive challenges faced by successive editors who tried to provide accurate reproductions of the map; this in turn has been a major obstacle to any kind of systematic commentary or analysis. Case in point: Konrad Miller’s 1916 publication, until now the authoritative modern resource, includes a black-and-white reproduction of the map at two-thirds size—but this was a lithographic reproduction, not photographic, that drew heavily on Scheyb’s engravings (62). These difficulties highlight the groundbreaking importance of the new digital presentation.

Talbert’s second contribution is a detailed cartographic analysis of the Peutinger map as a map. Chapter 2, co-authored with Martin Steinmann, is a physical analysis of how, when, and where the surviving copy was made. Parchment sheets were first glued together and the map was then drawn onto them. The water features were painted on first; mountain ranges and cities came next; third were the red lines connecting settlements; writing was added last. Analysis of the letterforms places the Peutinger map in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, perhaps in south Germany or Alsace. In Chapter 3, Talbert then examines the different features of the surviving map in turn: the principal landscape elements, the line work, the nature and placement of the letters and numerals, and the symbols employed, especially for settlements. Oddly, there are no illustrations in the text and no mention of the enormously helpful illustrations available online: http://www.cambridge.org/us/talbert/talbertdatabase/symbolclass.html. Entirely new in the map’s scholarship is Talbert’s serious attention to the use of color.

Only then does Talbert tackle the map’s famous route network (108–21). Modern scholars have assumed that the original map was practical in purpose and have focused on the red lines and numerical distances that link settlements across the map. Talbert persuasively rejects both this assumption and this focus. He explores the map’s relationship to the third- and fourth-century Antonine and Bordeaux itineraries (see also table 1, pp. 158–61), but he points out that the routes and distances on the Peutinger map are not always reliable. There are no total distances provided and no distinctions between more or less direct routes; there are almost no...