Articles

The shape of the Roman world

The shape of the Roman world

Walter Scheidel (Stanford University)

Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, April (2013)

Abstract

Ancient societies were shaped by logistical constraints that are almost unimaginable to modern observers. “ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World” (http://orbis.stanford.edu) for the first time allows us to understand the true cost of distance in building and maintaining a huge empire with premodern technology. This paper explores various ways in which this novel Digital Humanities tool changes and enriches our understanding of ancient history.



The Roman Empire was very large. At the peak of its power it extended 33 degrees of latitude from north to south and 34 degrees of longitude from east to west. The first of these accomplishments is by far the more remarkable, given that the inclination of the earth’s axis favors longitudinal expansion within ecologically familiar terrain: of all the contiguous empires in premodern history, only those of the Mongols, Incas and Russian czars matched or exceeded the north-south range of Roman rule. And unlike those of any other major contiguous empires, the Roman territories were dramatically segmented, wrapped around an inner sea of two and a half million square kilometers. Mountains ranges such as the Alps and Taurus on occasion required travelers to climb above 2,000 meters to traverse passes. Within its borders, the Roman Empire was unprecedented and remains without successor, still the only state in history to have claimed all that space. Holding on to it and distributing the resources required to maintain the imperial superstructure must have been a formidable challenge. And yet, after generations of scholarship, we have only a vague sense of how this system was spatially configured and how strongly its constituent elements were connected. Conventional maps look at the Roman Empire from high above. By representing distance as the crow (or rather a plane) flies, they fail to give us a proper sense of how different hard and liquid surfaces, altitudes and climes shaped people’s movement across this vast space. The real cost of travel, in terms of time and money, remains unknown. A pictorial itinerary such as the Peutinger Table might arguably do a better job than a modern map by focusing on connections, but does so in a way that likewise makes it impossible to understand spatial differentiation overall.

Click here to read this article from the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics

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