Off the Map: The Conceptualisation of Urban Space in the Ancient Roman World

Abstract

This thesis examines the way Romans conceptualised and navigated their urban spaces. Because this was a world where city maps were surprisingly rare, we should consider how else a city could be perceived. So many of our sources describe places based on landmarks which are not connected by named streets that ancient cities appear to be itinerant lists which jump from one destination to another. This results in urban spaces that are full of invisibilities, confusions and errors which the modern mind wants to rationalise and put back into place. I argue instead that we need to understand why the Romans accepted the situation as we find it rather than explain away an intrinsic element of our evidence. The city within texts has received a lot of attention in scholarship recently, with modern scholars such as Vasaly (1993) and Edwards (1996) who concentrate on the constructed worlds of historians, orators and poets. Archaeological remains, on the other hand, have begun to be analysed using modern urban theories in order to see tired ruins in new ways (Laurence (1994), Kaiser (2011) and others). This study combines some of the ways that these scholars have looked at both literary and archaeological sources to gain a different perspective on the study of ancient urban spaces. The focus lies with the late republican and early imperial periods where we can see the Romans using urban topography for self-identification, propaganda and ornament. By using the words, art and architecture of the ancients, we can begin to rearticulate the cities which they knew. This study is arranged in two halves which weave one story. The first half challenges our assumptions and the second attempts to recover what the ancients have left for us to see. Since we cannot escape the trappings of our own context, we must first examine what it has to offer, beginning with the way cartography has been studied and inserted into the ancient world. The next chapter looks at the city that was spoken, not written, within ancient urban navigation. After that, architecture takes us on a walk through ancient ritual. The final three chapters specific ancient contexts more closely in order to understand the invisibilities, confusions and errors which the Romans themselves accepted. With all of this combined, this thesis travels through ancient urban spaces and asks how they have been understood by the history that has remembered them.