A Companion to Late Antique Literature

by Scott McGill

  22.4 Maps

  The Christianization of the landscape is not only conveyed in pilgrims’ narratives but also in the sixth‐century Madaba map, a floor mosaic in the church of St. George in Madaba in Jordan. It contains the oldest cartographic impression of the Holy Land and presents a rather detailed representation of the urban landscape of sixth‐century Jerusalem (Donner 1992).

  The itinerary of Theophanes, as well as other itineraria adnotata, shows a fashioning of conception of space that is also reflected in maps, or itineraria picta (Vegetius, De re militari 3.6). The third‐century leather shield from Dura Europos (found in 1922) fits well into this category of itineraria picta and into cartographical thinking, even though it had a decorative and not a practical purpose. It presents stations along a coastal route in the northern Black Sea and the distances between them as well as pictures of ships (Dilke 1985, pp. 120–122; Brodersen 2001, pp. 14–16). It is, however, imaginable that illustrated itineraries have existed for practical use. The best known example of an itinerarium pictum is without doubt the unique Tabula Peutingeriana, named after its one‐time owner Konrad Peutinger (1465–1547). It is the best example of what comes close to a modern‐day map, although we should realize that, if the Romans had maps, these were completely unlike contemporary scale maps because of an entirely different Roman conception of geographical space (on maps see Dilke 1985). The multicolored copy of the Tabula Peutingeriana dates from ca. 1300 (e.g. Albu 2014), but most likely goes back to a late antique original. Its dimensions are extreme: 672 cm long and 33 cm high. It consists of 11 segments stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to India and depicts a detailed plotting of land routes, that is, a linear representation of place names and figures of distance. Apart from the network of roads that is at the base of the map, it shows mountains, rivers, seas, and islands. Cities, imperial capitals, hostels, and baths are indicated by pictorial symbols of various kinds. The map seems to be a representation of the entire road network and topographical organization of the late Roman world (Johnson 2014, p. 5), and appears to be based on written itineraries (Salway 2001, p. 47). Because Rome is at the center of the map, this is most likely an impression of the orbis Romanus, the inhabited world under Roman control. The foreshortened (north–south) and elongated (east–west) Peutinger map, which, for instance, shows the Mediterranean Sea as a narrow strip of water and Italy as wholly horizontal, cannot have had any practical use and was, like the Dura Europos shield, of a decorative nature. It has been suggested that the original was part of a scheme for a public space, in particular an imperial palace from the Tetrarchic period (Talbert 2010, pp. 142–157).

  22.5 Periegeseis and Periploi

  The oikoumenè‐based perception of space as displayed in the Peutinger map is challenged by the literary geographies of the periegesis and periplous. A periegesis was a descriptive journey – in prose or in verse – around a place or an area or even the known world. The best known is that of Dionysius Periegetes, who composed a periegesis in Greek of just under 1200 hexameters in Alexandria in the time of Hadrian (117–138). It is an exquisite specimen of ancient geography, but, like many works of geography in the Greco‐Roman world, it is evidence that the elite’s view of the geography of the world was very much a literary one. Dionysius’s text was not meant for practical use. Instead, as a composition of didactic poetry it was learned and studied in schools. The work was still very much en vogue and widely read in late antiquity. Its popularity was such that it was at least twice translated into Latin prose, first in the fourth century by Avienus, whose translation is known by the title Descriptio orbis terrae (Van de Woestijne, 1961), and then, some 200 years later, by Priscian, a grammarian working in Constantinople (Van de Woestijne 1953).

  Like the periegesis, the periplous is Greek in origin. A periplous is a circumnavigation or a description of a coastal voyage. Periploi are like itineraria lists of routes, ports, river mouths, coastal markers, peoples, and occasionally references to myths. The earliest periploi date from Greek classical times, but the genre was still very much alive in late antiquity. We have the Ora maritima of the fourth‐century senator Rufus Festus Avienus, which describes the coastline from Marseille to Cadiz (Murphy 1977). Rutilius Claudius Namatianus (fl. fifth century) describes a coastal voyage from Rome to Gaul undertaken in 416 in a poem (in elegiac meter) known as the De reditu suo (Doblhofer 1972–1977). Marcianus, who came from Heraclea Pontica, wrote around the year 400 a Periplus maris exteri (Periplous of the Outer Sea, i.e. the Ocean) in two books (Müller 2010, pp. 515–562). The work, which inter alia uses Ptolemy’s Geography as a source, is now incomplete and the distances between the coastal stopping places and significant geographical markers are given in stades (Dilke 1985, pp. 141–143). Periploi could also be mixed with other literary forms, such as novels or historical works. Ammianus Marcellinus’s description of the Black Sea (Res gestae 22.8) is essentially a periplous (Drijvers 1998).

  Periegeseis and periploi could have a practical use, but they also are clearly literary in character. Like the itineraria, they seem to reflect the late antique fervor for cataloguing the world (Racine 2010, pp. 29–76, 133–147) while organizing and systematizing knowledge in an encyclopedic form (Formisano 2012, pp. 512–520). The Expositio totius mundi et gentium, by an anonymous author and dated to the mid‐fourth century, is perhaps the best example of this (Rougé 1966). The text focuses on the mare nostrum and its periphery and presents a description of provinces, cities, and peoples from the far east to the west. Cities like Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, and Rome are elaborately described, but the descriptions of places become increasingly fantastical and mythical as they extend into places on the periphery of the oikoumenè (Romm 1992). Like Theophanes mentioned above, the author of the Expositio was probably a merchant, an identification supported by his reporting on the commercial possibilities within the Roman Empire (Rougé 1966, pp. 27–47). Other examples of the late antique dedication of systematizing knowledge are the Notitia dignitatum, the Notitia urbis Constantinopolis, Laterculus Veronensis, and the Notitia Galliarum (Seeck 1876).

  Two centuries later, during the reign of Justinian, another merchant and later monk by the name of Cosmas wrote about his travel experiences in the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean on his way to India (hence his epithet Indicopleustes). Cosmas Indicopleustes possibly came from Alexandria, but, if he did not, this was at least the city where he settled after his travels. He then became a monk and wrote his Christian Topography (Walska‐Conus 1968–1973). This elaborate work, which is in essence a periplous, presents a wealth of geographical, cosmological, and natural historical information about the eastern regions beyond the borders of the empire. It is, however, also a Christian polemical text since it denies the sphericity of the universe. Cosmas argues against his second‐century fellow Alexandrian Ptolemy that the world is flat instead of spherical and that it was formed after the Mosaic tabernacle: He imagined the world as a box covered by a canopy with the sun turning around a mountain standing in the center. Even among Christians Cosmas’s worldview was not influential and did not have many adherents, though his travel narrative remained striking enough for the text to live on.

  22.6 Historiography

  The historiographical work of Ammianus Marcellinus shows clearly the interdependence between historical and geographical descriptions. His Res gestae contains several geographical digressions. Apart from the one on the Black Sea mentioned above, there are excursuses on the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, the Boden Lake, Gaul, Persia, Egypt, and Thrace (Feraco 2004, 2011). The lost books of the Res gestae also contained geographical digressions, and it has been suggested that together these digressions presented the complete oikoumenè. In antiquity there was no clear distinction between history and geography, and descriptions of the physical world were often an integral part of historical narratives. Since the pioneering work of Herodotus, geography and history were mutually dependent in a way that was still the case in late antiquit
y as the historical writings of, for instance, Orosius, Jordanes, Procopius, and Isidore of Seville demonstrate (Merrills 2005). However, historical accounts provide geographical and travel information not only in digressions but also in reports about military expeditions or journeys of emperors and high officials. These reports can give practical evidence about routes and geographical circumstances, such as mountain ranges, the course and navigability of rivers, their crossing points, and many other such details.

  22.7 Vitae

  One might not immediately think of Christian biographic and hagiographic writings (vitae) about holy men and women as travel accounts, but many of these texts certainly merit such consideration. Holy men and women made a mental journey by ultimately making the decision to renounce the world and dedicate their life to God, and many also undertook physical journeys to the Egyptian or Syrian desert or to the Holy Land. Some of them remained in these locations, choosing an anchoritic life, settling in monasteries, or adopting other forms of religious coenobitism. Apart from monks living in monasteries or anchorites in the desert, there were the so‐called wandering monks, who did not live under monastic rule. They either wandered perpetually as beggars, teachers, or religious enthusiasts or journeyed from monastery to monastery with their traveling interrupted by short stays of only a few days at a time (Caner 2002; Dietz 2005, pp. 88–105). A prominent example of a wandering monk is Barsauma whose Syriac vita presents his journeys through the eastern provinces in the first half of the fifth century and can, therefore, be seen as a travel narrative. He visited, for instance, Jerusalem four times, the last time to expel the Jews who had taken over the Temple Mount, allegedly with the consent of the empress Eudocia. Together with his gang of monks, Barsauma did not refrain from intimidating behavior in association with verbal and physical violence in converting pagans, Jews, and Samaritans to Christianity (Hahn and Menze forthcoming). In contrast to Barsauma’s violent travels stand the peaceful journeys of John Moschus some two centuries later, as described in his Spiritual Meadow (Wortley 2010). John, a monk at the Theodosius monastery in Jerusalem, traveled to, among other sites, the Jordan River, Cilicia, Cyprus, Antioch, the Sinai desert, Alexandria, Antioch, Thessaloniki, and Rome before probably ultimately settling in Constantinople. He took this trip to observe diverse monastic practices, and his account of his trip contains many tales of religious practices and miracles.

  The culture of movement in late antiquity was diverse, and this diversity is reflected in the late Roman travel literature, which essentially organized and archived geographical knowledge of the oikoumenè, or parts of it, in textual genres (Johnson 2016). People traveled for many reasons and made use of a variety of transportation, as they did in the early empire. The Christianization of Mediterranean society brought a new dimension and framework to the culture of traveling and to geographical thinking about space. Christian travel developed into a significant and distinguishing feature in late antiquity, which then generated a new dynamism that expanded the scope and power of travel literature.

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