gems, ancient technology, ancient science, mapmaking, Roman mapmaking, cartography

At The Art of Love 2.125–142, Ovid recounts a charming vignette of Odysseus and Calypso spending a lazy seaside afternoon together. Calypso asks, again and again, that her captive lover recount his adventures in the Trojan War. Again and again, Odysseus “finds fresh words for the same old tale.” As they stroll, Calypso asks about one battle or another, while Odysseus, in answer, sketches out the scenes for her in the wet sand. “This,” he says, “is Troy (he made walls on the shore). This is the Simois. Let’s consider this spot my camp.” The allure of maps is universal: the arrangement of places, how one’s home fits into the scheme of the larger world, the extent of the inhabited world (oikoumenē). Like earlier Babylonian and Egyptian endeavors, early Greek maps depicted city plans, mine tunnels, geographical regions, the entire oikoumenē. Although the actual maps rarely survive—and maps were almost never included in manuscripts (see Neugebauer 1975 for an incomplete world map included in a thirteenth/fourteenth-century manuscript of Ptolemy’s Handy Tables)—some descriptions do: the information was considered useful, worth copying, and even entertaining. Ptolemy defines the art of cartography, inextricably intertwined with geography, as “an imitation through drafting of the entire known world together with the things that are, broadly speaking, connected with it” (Geography 1.1.1). He further distinguishes between world and regional cartography. The smaller scale of the latter allows for the inclusion of topographical details, such as harbors, rivers, and towns. It is also contested whether maps as we conceive of them existed at all in antiquity: Janni 1984 argues that graphic maps never extended beyond the initial stages, primarily because the ancients lacked a concept of scale. But the concept of “map” is fluid, and they took many forms, both pictorial and (more widely) verbal.