A Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind: Visualising Geographical Knowledge in the Roman World

Iain Ferris, A Map of the Body, a Map of the Mind: Visualising Geographical Knowledge in the Roman World (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2024). 9781803277813.

Reviewed by Edward Tang, Stanford University, edtanglh@stanford.edu.

The relationship between geography, the expression of power, and identity-making has long been recognized in Roman studies.1 The focus is usually on the literary imagination and representation of geography or on the architectural organization of space. Ferris’s project, to my knowledge, is the first monograph-length work that studies this relationship not through a specific type of material but through all available kinds of “geography products,” that is, “anything that could be said to be intended to convey…geographic information…even if that information was allusive” (p. xxi).2 While the book sets its modest aim as an introduction “targeted at undergraduate students of Roman archaeology and informed visitors to Rome” (p. xi), the project ultimately is more ambitious than Ferris advertises. The materials and interpretation provided will surely interest any reader who wishes to have a serious engagement with Roman conceptions of space and geography.

The first two chapters explore the ever-changing nature of geographical imagination as an ongoing and negotiated practice. Chapter One offers a close reading of four specific artifacts (the Map of Bedolina, Liver of Piacenza, Ara Pacis, and Prima Porta statue). Ferris emphasizes how important it was for communities in Italy to understand their order within the wider world. The four objects were not neutral records of territory but appropriations of rituals, myths, and historical motifs that allowed spatial imagination. However, it is unclear why these four objects are chosen, especially since the form and function of the first two differed sharply from the others. Chapter Two characterizes the late Republic and early Empire as a time of instability and shifting identities. Cicero’s praise of Varro (Acad. 1.9) illustrates the increasing sense of disorientation as Rome became connected to the wider world. Myth and history redirected Romans from a sense of drift, and geography products substantiated such mythical-historical environments. The geography products then would produce an immersive geography that Romans could inhabit cognitively, affectively, and bodily. More importantly, Ferris states that varied discourse, shifting identities, and the proliferation of official and unofficial geographical objects “fostered a relationship between noise and meaning” (p. 28). This statement crystallizes the book’s purpose in challenging imperialistic perspectives: however dominant imperial monuments and sites might be, subversion was unavoidable as viewers mentally reconfigured each site that made up their spatial imagination.

The following chapters advance Ferris’s claims by focusing on specific types of geography products organized thematically and spatially, with the discussion increasingly radiating outward from the city of Rome. Chapter Three examines material culture inside Rome to see how the city of Rome was perceived inside the city itself. Hills, mountains, water, trees, streets, and buildings functioned as mnemonic and ideological devices that defined the city. The presence of such marks are not surprising. What is interesting is how Ferris contrasts materialistic and literary imaginations and Roman and Greek cultural sensibilities. The Seven Hills may be foundational to Rome’s identity in textual sources, but they were only subordinated backdrops within monumental programs. Greek coinage appropriated images, but it was the Romans, from the mid-second century BCE onwards, who emphasized architecture on coinage. Such difference in coin-minting practice illustrates a top-down intervention to disseminate the ideal Roman city to the wider public, exemplifying again the need for Romans to reorient themselves.

Chapter Four investigates visual depiction of rivers: Ferris argues that rivers are central in connecting disparate time and spaces. From the first century BCE onward, Roman authors and artists increasingly personified rivers as active agents within imperial ideology. The Tiber was not a barrier but a moving body that enabled simultaneity and connections between the city and the countryside, the past and the present, and Rome and its distant regions. By contrast, other rivers were depicted on imperial monuments as conquered and traversed objects. Their visual depictions became pedagogical devices through which inhabitants of the city learned about the lands they would never visit, connecting the city to its wider Mediterranean world.

If the Tiber represented temporal and spatial fluidity, landscape art reflected the elite intention to hold Roman landscapes in fixed time and space. Chapter Five focuses on landscape art in both domestic and monumental-militaristic contexts. Drawing parallels with colonial landscape depiction in American history, Ferris stresses that Roman landscape paintings of Campania reflected elite fantasies of ownership and exploitation. Similarly, landscapes depicted on military monuments were conceptualized as navigable and observable land through an imperial lens. This created an “other-space” that enabled Roman viewers to conceptualize how Rome tamed the environments of distant peoples. Chapter Six extends such a lens to the Nilotic landscapes. Ferris refuses to see Roman representations of Egypt as simply exotic fascination or “Egyptomania.” Instead, Egypt served as a colonial landscape similar to Campanian paintings. Here Ferris provides a fascinating answer to a puzzling question: most Egyptian motifs pre-date the Roman annexation in 30 BCE; how could Egypt, unclaimed, become another form of colonial landscape? Ferris argues that the representative colonization of the Nile did not require physical claim to the land. It was a Roman reaction coming to terms with the modernity of their situation; they idealized and familiarized Egypt, allowing themselves to claim the region without needing formal conquest. It makes apparent another subtle form of violence embedded in Roman imperialism.

Chapter Seven is about artifacts related to mapping practices—surveying instruments, cadastral plans, monumental maps, and itineraries. These were largely imperial instruments that rendered space legible, governable, and symbolically ordered. Central to his argument are important maps such as Agrippa’s orbis terrarum, whose placement in the Porticus Vipsania and association with the cursus publicus reinforced Rome’s position as the spatial center. Ferris also analyzes the famed Severan map called the Forma Urbis Romae. Mapping was crucial for identity consolidation under Septimius Severus’s rule, as debates about Roman identity would have arisen again after an extended period of civil war. I am intrigued by Ferris’s idea about identity consolidation, and it would be great if the book also explained why there were limited literary references to the Forma Urbis as compared to the map of Agrippa. This might hint at a different intention behind the production of these imperial maps.

Chapter Eight investigates the use of non-Roman bodies as an imperial archive. These could be specific bodies, mythical or real, or geographies personified. Borrowing from de Certeau’s theory of spatial stories, Ferris moves away from the emphasis on legibility in mapping practices and towards how non-Roman bodies evoked meaning beyond numerical and quantifiable constraints.3 Scenes of imprisonment, enslavement, and rape exposed viewers bluntly to the force of imperial power. In addition, the spatial placement of all these non-Roman bodies in Rome itself melted down the actual territorial boundaries, justifying the universality of Roman power and experience. Interestingly, Ferris also argues that these images are mediated through foreboding and hinting at rape without explicit depiction. He speculates that these might also have suggested some potential reactions of Roman women to scenes of female subjectivity. I have a further question regarding Ferris’s analysis of Roman descriptions/depictions of Indians. He raises the question of why India would be depicted as a subordinate of Rome, with regards to material culture, even though India was not under Roman control. It is worth asking whether this imbalance should be interpreted in a light similar to that of the Egyptian scenes: If Romans represented material control over Egypt long before they officially annexed Egypt, why could they not imagine India also as subordinates?

Chapter Nine discusses the role of physical, imagined, and represented movement in producing and reinforcing Roman geographical knowledge. Journeys were not neutral acts of travel; rather, they functioned as key sites of identity formation. Elite mobility, especially imperial travel, generated cumulative literary and experiential geographies. Material culture—coins, cups, and even Christian catacomb paintings—then translated these geographies into legible, material forms. The aim was not to create total representations of space but selective revelations that connected marginal and distant landscapes while pointing viewers back “home” to the city of Rome.

Chapter Ten is a methodological and ideological recap. It revisits the book’s central claim that Rome circulated geographical knowledge even in the absence of a long-term state program. This circulation arose from its entanglement with power, violence, and disorientation. The acts of creating geography objects may be deliberate, but they were fragmented. These geographical objects made meaning and created geographical knowledge through accumulated viewing and communication that could be factual but also allusive, specific but also general. This is what makes the visual program coherent in effect, without being programmatic in intent.

Ferris has successfully achieved what he sets out to do. The book is filled with a myriad of concrete examples; even if his primary audience may not fully appreciate its theoretical underpinnings, the book nevertheless serves as a great introduction to the material culture of the Roman Empire. Moreover, his focus on the asymmetrical, dominant role of the state in creating these materials does not perpetuate the colonial narrative. Rather, by heeding the potential noises present and the fragmentary nature of these attempts, he also foregrounds the role of other actors in shaping Roman geographies (the plurality here is intended). Last but not least, he makes a deliberate attempt to break away from the Roman identity problem as cultural assimilation. Instead, he focuses on how Romans thought spatially, how the Roman Empire was made legible, and how geographic knowledge was imprinted and reinforced on geography products.

Ferris’s readers would surely benefit from a fuller discussion and treatment of several issues. First, Ferris does not differentiate sufficiently between objects of a private nature where the commissioner and audience overlap and public monuments where the audience is heterogeneous and reception could be open. For the latter, there is minimal discussion on whether the users and viewers are indeed “Romans.” Without explicit clarification, the Romans (or specifically, the audience in the city of Rome) are most of the time treated as a unified body that seem to react homogeneously to the geographical objects.

This leads to my second critique. Ferris did not provide illustrative discussions of the varied interpretations. For example, how would a slave imagine the Campanian paintings as opposed to villa owners? How would a non-Roman auxiliary troop receive Trajan’s Column as compared to a Roman citizen? The answers would be speculative but provide readers with a sense of how noises were created, suppressed, and negotiated. Scholarship on slave and subaltern agency has adopted this method to imagine underprivileged experiences despite the dominance of elite material culture.4 Had this monograph consulted these theoretical frameworks, it would have benefited from a similar approach.

Thirdly, as a book aimed at non-specialists, accurate citation practices are particularly important. The book has not clarified in its footnotes which authors Ferris disagrees with so that readers could easily find their way back to previous scholarship. I offer one example of why this matters. Page 108 mentions the existence of literature on Romano-Egyptian relationships and interplay between images with Egyptian themes in Roman art. There is then a footnote (n. 1) listing relevant scholarship. Immediately afterward, he suggests that some of this scholarship too eagerly accepts the idea of a rampant “Egyptomania” at Rome and in Italy at face value. Whose writing does he refer to? He might have delineated which authors are on which sides; otherwise, readers may come away with the wrong impression that all of them follow the same line of discourse. To my knowledge, Blouin’s work cited in this footnote does not foreground the Roman imagination of Egypt or the appropriation of Egyptian art. The targeted audience of the book could have benefited from clearer pointers regarding the pre-existing secondary literature.

That said, Ferris’s monograph provides a captivating and thought-provoking space (pun intended) to consider material representation of geography. Future work can surely be built on this foundation, perhaps with a stronger focus on what distinguishes Roman geography products different from those of other empires, or whether non-imperial members of the empire had access to different materials through which they conceived the world.

Table of Contents

Preface (xii–xxix)

1. Maps of the Mind (1–20)

2. Strangers in a Strange Land (21–42)

3. Rome in Rome (43–66)

4. A River Without End (67–86)

5. Staged Designs (87–107)

6. Landscape and Desire (108–23)

7. An Unseen Ruler (124–49)

8. Maps of the Body (150–88)

9. Moving Away from the Pulsebeat (189–224)

10. Slouching Towards Empire (225–55)

Notes

1. For instance, Katherine Clarke, Between Geography and History: Hellenistic Constructions of the Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Ray Laurence, The Roads of Roman Italy: Mobility and Cultural Change (London: Routledge, 1999); Claude Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015).

2. The concept of geography product is from Katja Pilhuj, Women and Geography on the Early Modern English Stage (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 12–13.

3. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 116–17.

4. For instance, Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen, The Material Life of Roman Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Sarah Levin-Richardson, The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, Class, and Gender at the Margins of Roman Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).