Roman Geographies of the Nile: From the Late Republic to the Early Empire by Andy Merrills (review)
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The jacket blurb bills Roman Geographies of the Nile as "a wholly original interpretation of the deeper significance of geographical knowledge during the later Roman Republic and early Principate." While the claim to originality is not sustained through all six chapters, Merrills makes innovative contributions to ancient geographical cognition, to the politics of spectatorship, and to the methodological combination of pictorial and textual sources.
The author departs from the uncontroversial connection between Roman political power and geographical discourse but disputes the conceit of an authoritative "imperial geography." The translation of political power into intellectual influence, he asserts, was neither straightforward nor uniform; public display maps, triumphal tituli, landscape paintings, travel itineraries, and literary descriptions contributed diversely and even contrarily to geographical thinking. By examining the interdependence of these media in the case of the Nile, Merrills concludes that geographical authority remained contested throughout the early empire. Chapters 1 to 3 and 5, which engage directly with conceptual geography, are the most compelling in this regard.
Chapter 1 extends Merrills' introductory reflections on Roman geographical thought as shaped primarily by text. When authors invoked public mapping projects (e.g., Agrippa's map), they did not rely on them exclusively but supplemented and even challenged them with narrative sources. Official "chorographies" then were not monopolies of detailed or definitive information, but simplified spatial orderings intended for the gaze of the populus. The Nile mosaic at Praeneste resembled public cartographic objects in that it too evoked, but did not accurately represent, Egyptian geography.
Chapter 2 continues the civic articulation of geographical thought by examining geographical trophies in triumphs. The parade of conquered rivers, mountains, and regions in the form of anthropomorphic figures and tituli severed these constituents from their native surroundings and reassembled them in Rome as discreet notional units. In this vein, Octavian's triumph cognitively morphed the Nile into a fragmented entity demarcated by its imperial imprisonment and contrasted to the Tiber.
The Egyptianizing scenes in the houses of Pompeii, the subject of chapter 3, both echo and diverge from official formulations of the Nile. While they too deployed a triumphal ideology, their household setting activated a private, not communal, dynamic. In awakening their recipients to their elevated position as spectators, these domestic Nilescapes empowered the leisured to experience a "managerial" ownership of Egypt. Through their "seigneurial gaze," viewers asserted their vicarious investment in imperial conquest and staked their claim to a place in Rome's Mediterranean elite. [End Page 97]
The investigation sent upriver by Nero in the early 60s opens chapter 5, which examines the conceptualization of the Nile as a travel route. Triangulating the accounts of that expedition in Seneca and the elder Pliny with Hellenistic periploi and itineraries reveals that Nero's explorers travelled with outdated itineraries that they revised with their own observations. Strabo's Geography exemplifies another transmutation of traveling experience into narrative: he describes his Egyptian peregrinations linearly, as a succession of sites concatenated along a perfectly straight Nile. This unrealistic linearity appears also in Tacitus, Juvenal, and the Greek novels in the form of nonsensical Nilotic routes. Merrills proposes that these abstractions stem from ancient concepts of landscape as a series of nodes rather than as a planar surface, and he reinforces his argument by relating the cartographic caricatures of Egypt to modern schematizations of space: the rectilinear Nile valley engraved in the original cover of the Napoleonic Description de l'Égypte, and the nodal points in London tube maps or in GPS transportation.
Chapters 4 and 6 retrace rather than extend recent scholarship on the Roman Nile as a vehicle of Roman ethics and politics. In chapter 4, Lucretius and Seneca reflect on Nilotic sublimity as a paradigm of rational contemplation and as a corrective to superstition and hubris; both authors eschew a conclusive explanation of the annual flood to demonstrate the ideal of tolerating intractable problems. The Iseum of...
