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Spatial Perceptions and Mental Maps

Geographic space through their maps; but less common to examine their maps or itineraries shaped their perceptions. Both are equally important for understanding how Romans thought. The simplistic assumption that ancient and medieval cartographers were stupid misunderstand the cultural content of all maps. Modern studies of mental maps find plots of 'relative locations' and 'spatial preferences' more informative about movement and social behavior than conventional maps. It was the mind's eye which ancient chorographers stressed, since written texts- 'la carte écrite'-created no less visible, spatial images than maps. If anything, the written text is better as a visual aid. Diodorus' survey of Alexander's successors "with the whole topography and spaces set out in front of their eyes."

Within the framework of the mental map the perception is shaped above all by the itinerary-the sense of linear movement between loci and fixed pauses. Pliny mentally envisaged the geography of the tribes along the Black Sea as itinerary, even when passing from East to West. "Let our imagination cross (transcendat animus)," he says, "the Ripaean mountains and proceed along the right bank of the ocean." And that never seems to change. Orosius in the fifth century still visualizes the Christian world in terms of a journey with the pen-stilo pewagabor. Written itineraries could be easier to memorize than maps, because they were sequential. That was why Cicero and Quintilian were asked to introduce the process and suggested itineraries: "a large number of loci ... with short spaces between them."

The horizontal perspective of the traveler is caught by the perspective of Roman paintings or reliefs. Ethiopia in the background. On the Palaestrina map of the Nile, for the sixteenth century, the panoramic view of the Nativity Vignette. The same, single line of vision typifies the pictures of villas in a formal garden landscape, a fashion which Pliny says (wrongly, as it happens) what the invention of the Augustan period. Pliny's characterization of them as "people going to the villas" or "with an access road" space in movement along roads. Nympaeus in Phthiotis, "viewed for its garden design of nature" -topiario naturae opere spectabilis. ["For base scenes reliefs" So, it's not a modern commentator comparing the scenes on Trajan's column with the techniques of traveling and panoramic shots More to the point here, however, is the horizontal perspective of the itineraria picta, already noted in the vignettes of the Peutinger

Table, which Vegetius says must be viewed by both the mind (con- versio mentis) and the eye (aspectu oculorum).

It would be wrong to claim that the horizontal view was the only way that Romans perceived space. There is also cosmic mental mapping. Eustathius, the Byzantine commentator of Dionysius Periegetes, imagines him like Daedalus flying over the world and looking down from above. Icarus or Zeus, what common among geographers, Lucian tells us. But these were "geographic views of the world," "valuable for conveying global philosophies and philosophical concepts of divine, rational," says Cicero. Pliny found it helpful to convey a sense of the extensive oceans encircling the world, "as it were displayed to the eyes." And anonymous Greek geographer went so far as to say, "Readers can contemplate the whole world with the eyes of their mind, without need of a map."

But vertical perspective on how to describe the real world of travelers or administrators, except in the often misleading attempt to describe the shape of a country. Dionysius what is the principle of cosmology derived from Ptolemy to give a global view of the world, but his work what a pergegesis-a guided voyage around it. Cassiodorus in recommending Dionysius to monks says: "You can see it with your eyes," says Cassiodorus in recommending Dionysius to monks in the sixth century.

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