After important early work on the Roman Senate, the better part of T.'s career has been dedicated to a decades-long inquiry into various aspects of Roman geographical consciousness. This volume collects nineteen papers from that project, all but one previously published, but many originally appearing in ‘publications with limited circulation’. This comprises much though not all of T.'s shorter output in the area over the past 25 years; notably not included are a few important essays in collected volumes edited by T. himself. Most of the chapters are standard research articles or talks, but there are also three book reviews and a reference article (from the Landmark Julius Caesar). The introduction mentions some light editing of the papers and cross-references within the volume, and there is an index of the whole. A quick cross-check of readily available articles confirms a significant number of new illustrations, both modern maps and images of ancient artefacts. The whole is divided into three broad thematic sections: on conceptions of space of empire (in inter alia Caesar, Pliny, the Antonine Itinerary and general cartographic culture), on issues related to specific ancient maps (especially the Peutinger and Artemidorus instances) and on (mostly) roads and portable sundials.

The previously unpublished paper – ‘Copyists’ Engagement with the Peutinger Map’ – is a meditation on how and why various errors and changes arose over the course of the copying history of the Peutinger map. In limited cases we can assume that certain locations were added or that a few of the major city icons were changed in copying. But other features (or errors) like colours, special notices and missing lines or mileage figures are hard to attribute either to the original or later copies. Given how poorly we understand that history, it is probably not surprising that the paper is ultimately somewhat aporetic. We do not, for instance, know how many generations are involved, much less the aims and skillsets of the copyists at any point. Still, T. is right to point out that scholarship on almost any aspect of the map needs a coherent outlook on the various issues he raises.

Beyond the new material, the fact of collecting these papers highlights two features of T.'s work that have perhaps been less visible in individual works than they are when the articles are seen laid out side-by-side. The first of these is the substantial comparative dimension to much of T.'s work: for instance, an extended comparison of Roman road networks to those of other imperial formations (pp. 223–30; Inca, early imperial China, early Modern Japan, Ottoman), an extended comparison of changes in the Roman sense of time to ones in Tokugawa Japan (pp. 281–4) or an entire chapter on ‘China and Rome: the Awareness of Space’.

Second, T.'s work has long examined ‘worldviews’, not in the most general or metaphorical sense of that term, but rather meaning conceptions of the structure of the world in a concrete sense. How is the world understood to be shaped and where are individual places understood to fit into that shape? The most explicit expressions of worldview are maps; and T.'s extensive work on ancient cartography has established what I think could reasonably be described as the outlines of current consensus views on the subject. But worldview can obviously be expressed in other ways, and I do not think I had fully appreciated the range of evidence T. has looked at: sundials; diplomata; milestones; boundary markers; itineraries; literary texts; documentary papyri; artwork. The clearest single example of how he brings these together is perhaps to be found in his crucial 2004 intervention ‘Rome's Provinces as Framework for Worldview’, but again it is really the volume as a whole that makes the point. At any rate future researchers would do well to look for evidence in places that are not obviously ‘geographical’.

Finally, I would like to direct the attention of readers to the last paper in the volume, ‘Roman Concern to Know the Hour in Broader Historical Context’. This originally appeared in a Festschrift for Alexander Podosinov, which is held, according to WorldCat, in six libraries in the United States, one in the UK and one in Germany. T. demonstrates that there was in fact a widely distributed Roman ‘concern’ to know the hour, but then argues that this was relatively unusual compared to what we know of contemporary societies in the Mediterranean and the Near East. (Presumably this helps explain the observation that there is much more evidence for hourly timekeeping in the epigraphic record than in the papyrological, but this question and the more general one of differences between bodies of evidence would probably repay attention.) This immediately raises questions of causation and of potential conflict between Rome and different timekeeping cultures. In the compass of 26 generously illustrated pages T. does not fully answer those questions, but he does set up a research programme that other researchers would do well to take up. As T. makes clear, the topic is not entirely new; there is, for instance, the work by R. Laurence and S. Erlich he cites (and more recently by K. Miller). Nonetheless, his contribution is an important one, bringing to bear the characteristic virtues noted above, a combination of diverse sets of evidence and attention to comparative lessons, to create a framework to bring that earlier work together.

Few, if any, readers will sit down and read this volume straight through (though T.'s prose is always excellent). It will serve rather as a valuable reference tool for anyone working in the area, both for the evidence already collected and conclusions already drawn and for the pointers to new directions (for timekeeping as above, but also, for instance, for Roman roads and the Archive of Theophanes).