This volume considers the relations between geographical knowledge and power in the Roman world and how this was visualised in Roman culture. It argues that Romans engaged in an ideological discourse using a range of ‘geographical products’ – pictorial maps, plans, survey information, literature, art and images – in order to present the world to the Roman people. It offers sophisticated ‘readings’ of images – the Ara Pacis, Augustus of Prima Porta – thick with geographical detail, often setting them alongside concepts drawn from modern works such as A. Artaud’s The Theatre of Cruelty or modern ideas such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s Marxist linguistical theory of heteroglossia (pp. 17–20). It argues that Romans were conscious of such concepts as, for example, leaving the late Republican period, or a ‘Project of Leaving the First Century bce’ and entering a new phase. The dissemination of geographical information was part of this design. Objects of ‘geographical’ art, ‘as a medium for communication … could have signified the specificity of an encounter-contact generating souvenir, but which became solidified and validated by cataloguing and museum-like display’ (p. 19). It is unclear quite what this means, but it asks much of both producer and ‘viewer’, in that it suggests a museum-like quality to Rome.

Chapter 1 considers two pre-Roman spatial ‘maps’, the rock-art map of Bedolina, possibly a representation of the layout of a small community, and the Liver of Placenza, a ‘map of the body and a map of the heavens’ (which ‘sang the body electric, detailing a journey for which no itinerary was available beyond myth and belief’ [p. 8], perhaps reflecting the author’s interest in the ‘post-punk music of Joy Division’ [p. xv]). Chapter 2 considers the city of Rome and its interpretation by Romans, which leads to sophisticated, but questionable, suggestions of many levels of meaning in a letter of Cicero to Varro (Academica 1.9). F. discusses contemporary views of Roman identity expressed in Cicero’s letter, before turning to other ‘products’ of Etruscan date and finally to Augustan constructions, designed to make ‘there here’ (p. 41). Chapter 3 considers more ‘products’ – the depiction of Rome, its natural topography, designed to remind Romans of their identity. Chapter 4 looks at rivers and the significance of their geographical personifications – especially of the Tiber, ‘the river most eminent of all’ (Ennius, Ann. 1.67 Va.²), and the Nile. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the presentation of landscapes in paintings/sculpture and mosaics respectively, before considering the use of Egyptian stone in architecture as a sign of imperialism. Chapter 7 covers land surveyors and the development of Roman maps. It discusses the well-known examples, from the Forma Urbis Romae to the Peutinger Map, but also less well-known examples of maps and plans. It considers the use of itineraries as practical aids to travel. Chapter 8 surveys the depiction of non-Roman peoples in Roman art and monuments. ‘Armchair’ travellers were offered the ability to imagine foreign lands and peoples; barbarians were eroticised to appeal to the ‘gaze’ of the Roman viewer, explored in the context of the Aphrodisias Sebasteion reliefs. The focus then switches to the portrayal of Romans by foreigners, and to the possibility of reading ‘hidden transcripts’, and on to Roman triumphal arches (there is no citation of the important, pioneering work on ‘hidden transcripts’ by J.C. Scott). Chapter 9 engages with the notion of itineraries presented in Roman art – on sarcophagi, coins, and cups –; earlier in the book (p. 144) we are promised a discussion of the Vicarello Goblets, which appears, but in little detail (p. 210). The final chapter brings together the previous discussions to explore the development over time of Roman geographical imagery. It argues that, while there were ‘few advances in the creation and dissemination of written ethnographic knowledge after the earlier Principate … there were constant attempts to visualise certain aspects of geographical knowledge’ (pp. 225–6). One must wonder about the intended audience (a subject not dealt with in much detail in the book). Rather like literature, private art must surely have been commissioned by elites for an elite audience. It is unlikely too, that many images and their implicit message would have been immediately accessible to every viewer.

F. argues that there was no programme of dissemination – no planned message (without much engagement with P. Zanker). He sees the importance of the knowledge in terms of social memory – ways in which information was conceptualised and visualised in the Roman world. He moves away from the notion of ‘illiterate geography’ and argues for more complex social dynamics. What F. presents, though, is unclear: ‘a geography of obscenity, ecstatic and anti-tragic it discovered in the contemporary world of Rome visible signs, apprehensible epiphanies of a universal link between the organic and the inorganic, dynamically identifying different process in emblematic correspondences between flesh and earth, cloud and breath, blood and water, rock and body’ (p. 226).

There is a wide coverage of modern work on ancient geography and Roman art, and a vivid presentation of a good deal of less well-known material culture (very well illustrated). Occasionally, coverage is thin – it is careless, for example, to state, without reference to the extensive literature on the subject, that the so-called Artemidorus papyrus ‘might in fact eventually turn out to be a forgery’ (p. 131). The discussion of Agrippa’s map assumes it was a ‘displayed map’ with ‘an accompanying commentary or a database of a kind’ (p. 132). Leaving aside the absurdity of a database, there are no references at this point to the modern debate about the nature of Agrippa’s map.

There is certainly food for thought in what F. has put together, even if many of the arguments are both unclear and questionable. Questionable in the sense that much depends on the interpretation of the viewer – both ancient and modern. Their various interpretations may not be the same, and much is assumed about what ancient viewers ‘would have’ seen in ‘geographical products’. Ultimately, the arguments in the book are not fully convincing; they represent a personal view of the author. While that is not necessarily a problem, other interpretations are equally possible. The book is quirky, and a wide, eclectic range of comparanda are used throughout (modern literature, music and other ideas, as well as a poem written by F. in the appendix); although these may have prompted F. to think about ‘products’ in a particular way, it is debatable whether they add much to our knowledge. The text is dense, florid and excessively elaborate – often pretentious. Despite these flaws, readers will take something away from the book, which certainly offers much to think about.