No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

A map is] a social construction of the world expressed through the medium of cartography. Far from holding up a simple mirror of nature that is true or false, maps redescribe the world-like any other document-in terms of relations of power and of cultural practices, preferences, and priorities. What we read on a map is as much related to an invisible social world and to ideology as it is to phenomena seen and measured in the landscape. 1 The Severan Marble Plan is an extraordinary map. Carved between 203 and 211 CE, it represented the imperial city of Rome in plan view, depicting every temple and warehouse, every street and alley, every tenement building and luxury dwelling, every ground-floor room, doorway and internal staircase (Figs 1, 9). Centered on the Capitoline and carved at a scale of 1:240, it mapped an area of more than 13.5km 2. Its accuracy and detail make it a crucial resource for understanding the imperial city. Unfortunately, only about 12% of

No abstract

This chapter explores how the size, diversity, and connectivity of the Roman Empire in the first centuries CE fostered developments in image communication in a civilization in which levels of visual literacy, especially among city populations, should be considered quite well developed. At the same time, a full grasp of a monument’s iconography was not essential for effective communication at a range of levels. A remarkable, seemingly modern phenomenon of the period is the proliferation and stability of image use, enabling complex, varied interplays of empire and place to be articulated in all segments of society, with or without the involvement of the authorities.