The Tabula Peutingeriana or “Peutinger Map” is crucial to the understanding of the development of classical and medieval cartography. Produced in around 1200, the work was ultimately derived from a late Roman original, and thus may be regarded as the closest thing we have to an extant classical map. In both structure and detail the map is unique. It represents the world from India in the east to the Pyrenees in the west (and sections that have since been lost probably extended this to Spain and Britain) in a mapped frieze that is roughly 22 feet long and a little more than 12 inches in height. Were this extraordinary elongation not enough, the detail of the Peutinger Map is equally remarkable: although rivers, seas, and mountains are present, its most conspicuous feature is the complex web of roads, routeways, and stopping points that cover this landmass. Part unique cartographic anamorphosis, part London Underground map, the Peutinger Table offers a tantalizing glimpse of Roman approaches to cartography that are vastly different from our own.

The principal stated ambition of Richard Talbert's important new book is to lay the foundations for further study of this fascinating document. The result is a delight to the historian of cartography and should accomplish just that. The book examines the eleven extant pages of the map manuscript in extraordinary detail, and considers their history over the last half-millennium. This includes a careful assessment of the several (imperfect) scholarly copies that have been made of the map during this period. The exact replication of vast quantities of visual information has always been tremendously difficult—this is one of the reasons why large maps had such a high social and cultural status before the advent of printing. Yet the very fact that early modern scholars had such difficulty in making faithful copies of the Peutinger manuscript is also a forceful reminder of the perils that confront the historian when attempting to reverse this process and trace the same map back to its own antecedents. We can probably assume that the thirteenth-century copyists of the Peutinger Map were careful in their task, since late Roman toponyms are generally reproduced accurately, and the extraordinary visual balance of the image must have been derived from the original. Nevertheless, it is as well to remember that this is a copy of a Roman map, and a late copy at that.

Modern photographic technology makes reproduction easier than ever and this is where Talbert's project really excels. A supplementary (and freely accessible) webpage hosted by Cambridge University Press includes a wealth of material, including a complete database of all of the toponyms on the map (with corresponding reference to later Roman geographical texts and to the Barrington Atlas) and reproductions of all of the later copies. Most prominent of all is a high-resolution composite image of the map parchments themselves, joined together to form a (largely) seamless whole. The user is presented with a variety of visual overlays, in order to highlight specific aspects of the map. For the first time, in other words, the Tabula Peutingeriana is genuinely available for detailed research to a wide audience. The effects of this on scholarship should be extraordinary.

Talbert offers his own interpretation of the map, and this is generally persuasive. He suggests from the peculiar dimensions of the image, from the prominence afforded to Rome (and to a lesser extent Constantinople), and from the obvious effort involved in its production, that the map was intended as a display piece, perhaps in an apsidal throne room of one of the emperors of the early fourth century. This interpretation is convincing enough, although his conviction that the distortions of the map were intended to shock and amuse an audience wholly familiar with other forms of global mapping is more difficult to sustain. Important as these suggestions are, however, the true importance of Rome's World is certainly in its presentation of a fascinating source to a wide audience. In this it has succeeded triumphantly.