Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East - Группа авторов - Страница 37

Even with cutting edge theory, geographical writers were still constrained by the empirical data, though Strabo and others severely criticized any sources whose methods and measurements were less than satisfactory. Their handling of material tended to treat geographia as a physical science or as part of historia, the enquiry into human experience in time, space, and culture (Clarke 1999: 28–29). Both approaches employed theory and logic as well as practical observation, whether theoretical physics and measurements or political principles and ethnography (Roseman 2005: 29–30). Most geographical writers used both approaches in turns. For example, Hecataeus’s Periodos gēs and Genealogiai (or Historiai) were part of the same intellectual project and cover similar topics (Clarke 1999: 60–62), and Herodotus (4.36–40) used his research on the peoples of Asia to dispute earlier cartographers’ ideas of a circular earth divided evenly between Europe and Asia. Both Pseudo-Skylax and Agatharchides of Cnidus followed the Peripatetic school, and their Periploi combine distance measurement with sometimes oddly chosen but detailed topographic, ethnographic, botanic, or zoologic descriptions (Pseudo-Skylax: Shipley 2011: 77–81, 2012: 15–17; Agatharchides: Burstein 1989: 13; Strabo 14.2.15). Even Alexander’s bematists followed the prevailing intellectual trend and added to their measurements some local details to edify their Aristotelian-trained king.

Until the Latin texts of Pomponius Mela’s Chorographia (43 CE) and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Greek scholarship provided the only documentary geographies on the Near East (Mela: Romer 1998; Pliny: cf. Murphy 2004). Historians such as Livy supplied some information, but not as part of a larger geographical project. For most Romans knowledge of Near Eastern geography arrived in the form of triumphal paintings, images including allegorical personifications of conquered cities to topographies, cityscapes, and panoramas depicting notable features or historical narratives of the victorious generals’ expeditions (Nicolet 1991: 69; Holliday 1997: 137ff; Murphy 2004: 154ff). Livy (37.59.3–5) reports that Scipio Asiaticus paraded 134 representations of captured Asian towns (oppidorum simulacra) in his 188 BCE triumph, and in his triumph of 61 BCE Pompey is said to have had inscriptions listing conquered regions and cities from Pontus to Arabia, alongside images (possibly geographical), and a trophy of the entire oikoumenē or orbis terrarum (Plut. Pomp. 45.1–3; Appian Mith. 17.117; Dio 37.21.2). Even Ovid (Ars Am. 1.213–228) recommended explaining the triumphal geographic paintings as an aid to flirtation, listing Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Persia, regions taken in Augustan campaigns, though the allegorical captive Persia was only ever anticipated of Gaius Caesar’s unrealized campaign (Nicolet 1991: 44). Agrippa’s world map was a grandiose version of the triumphal paintings, representing the world now conquered by Roman forces and the oikoumenē subjected to Roman imperium (cf. Holliday 1997: 137). He and his colleagues on the project mapped the world with a system similar to Eratosthenes’s sphragides (see below), using twenty-four regions each with length and width dimensions (Nicolet 1991: 101–102).¹²

Such displays forcefully communicated the message of Roman dominance, which geographical theorists now had to accommodate in their conception of the world and its physical and political forces. Clarke proposed Polybius, Posidonius, and Strabo as the three Hellenistic geographers who led their field in writing philosophical geography to fit the new political reality (Clarke 1999: 193; also Nicolet 1991: 47, on Strabo’s “intentions”). Roman claims to global domination persisted in political and geographical discourses for several centuries, reflected early on in Polybius’s remarks (3.59.3–4) on Roman conquests and the expansion of geographical knowledge. He credits Alexander’s empire with knowledge of Asia, and Romans with everywhere else, an assertion based more on Roman primacy throughout the oikoumenē than actual possession of it (Nicolet 1991: 30–31). Later in the first centuries BCE and CE there emerged a notion that in conquest and knowledge of the Near East Rome succeeded the four “world” empires: Assyria, Media, Persia, and Macedonia, although recognition of the rival Parthians complicated that picture.¹³ Strabo and Pliny the Elder represent the solidification of the Roman geopolitics: both describe the oikoumene in a circuit around the Mediterranean with Rome at the physical and allegorical center, much as the Peutinger Table’s source later depicted (Nicolet 1991: 172–173, 192–194; Clarke 1999: 210ff; Murphy 2004: 132ff).