Legacy of Greco-Roman Mapmaking

New York Public Library

A folio from a 15th-century Latin translation of Ptolemy's influential "Geographia."

Long before people could look upon Earth from afar, completing a full orbit every 90 minutes, the Greeks and the Romans of antiquity had to struggle to understand their world's size and shape. Their approaches differed: the philosophical Greeks, it has been said, measured the world by the stars; the practical, road-building Romans by milestones.

As the Greek geographer Strabo wrote at the time: "We may learn from both the evidence of our senses and from experiences, that the inhabited world is an island, for wherever it has been possible for men to reach the limits of the earth, sea has been found, and this sea we call 'Oceanus.' And whenever we have not been able to learn by the evidence of sense, there reason points the way."

Strabo's words will greet visitors to a new exhibition, "Measuring and Mapping Space: Geographic Knowledge in Greco-Roman Antiquity," which opens Friday at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, at 15 East 84th Street in Manhattan. The show runs through Jan. 5.

Roger S. Bagnall, director of the institute, an affiliate of New York University, said the exhibition would not only cross ancient borders and cultures but also modern disciplines. "Our exhibitions and digital teams," he said, "present a 21st-century approach to the ancient mentality concerning geographic space and how it is represented."

The show brings together more than 40 objects that provide an overview of Greco-Roman geographical thinking — art and pottery, as well as maps based on classical texts. (Hardly any original maps survive; the ones in the exhibition were created in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance from Greek and Roman descriptions.)

"Geography is not just maps," said the guest curator, Roberta Casagrande-Kim, a scholar of classical concepts of the underworld that go back well before Dante took his journey through the nine circles of hell. "There is also the cognitive side underlying mapping," she said.

Making sense of the world's dimensions must have seemed daunting at first. Plato wrote of Socrates saying the world is very large and those who dwell between Gibraltar and the Caucasus — in his memorable imagery — live "in a small part of it about the sea, like ants or frogs about a pond, and that many other people live in many other such regions."

An early advance in Greek thinking was Aristotle's discovery, in the latter half of the fourth century B.C., that the world must be spherical. He based this on observations of lunar eclipses, ships disappearing hull first on the horizon, and the changing field of stars observed as one travels north and south.

Then Eratosthenes, a librarian at Alexandria in the third century B.C., employed the new geometry to measure the world's size with simultaneous angles of the sun's shadow taken at widely distant sites in Egypt. That yielded a remarkably accurate measure of Earth's circumference: it was clear that the world they knew — the three connected continents of Asia, Europe and Africa — was only a part of lands unknown, out of sight but not out of mind.

Other artifacts on view illustrate ancient methods of surveying and measuring lands, and some of the earliest efforts to measure longitude and latitude and to divide the world into climate zones. From north to south, both the Greeks and the Romans identified the frigid Arctic Circle, the northern temperate hemisphere, the torrid Tropic of Cancer, the southern temperate zone and the South Pole. The two temperate zones were believed to be the only habitable regions, but contact between the two was thought unlikely.

Across the wall of the first gallery is projected a digital replica of the Peutinger Map, more than 22 feet long and 2 feet high, illustrating how Roman mapping was at once practical and magnificent. It charts the empire's roads, cities, ports and forts from Britain to India. Sketches of trees mark forests in Germany. Topography is minimal, roads are off-scale wide, towns are indicated by symbolic walls or towers — more of a traveler's guide but much too large to serve as a handy road map.

In a study of the map, Richard J. A. Talbert, a historian at the University of North Carolina who specializes in cartography of the Greeks and the Romans, noted that in one sense it was an example of common Roman "journey" charts, much like the Greek "periploi" — mostly written descriptions of landmarks and ports mariners were likely to encounter.

Geographers then were less committed to drawing maps than to narrative wayfinding. Distances had priority over orientations; getting from here to there was more important than the lay of the land.

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