1839 Lithograph Reduction of the Only Surviving Map of the Roman Roads

This is a 19th century printing of the Peutinger Table, one of the only and most important survivals of ancient Roman geography. It is a reduction of the only surviving example of an itinerarium pictum, a visual guide to the Roman road system. Its title here, Table Théodosienne, refers to the assumption that the map was drawn during the reign of Emperor Theodosius.

On The Map

This map, presented on one sheet in three strips, depicts the whole of the Roman world: Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Levant, divided from Africa by a narrow (almost river-like) Mediterranean Sea. The third strip extends from the Nile Delta and the Black Sea to the eastern extremes of the known world, reaching as far as India. The original indicates travel distances, and rest points along the roads as well as other features useful to travelers and survives in a sole, thirteenth century manuscript copy: a single, long parchment roll, approximately 22 feet long and little more than one foot wide: its reduction to a single sheet has necessitated the excision of much of the manuscript's detail, but the present example preserves the uniquely distorted picture of the Roman world presented by the original.

The unusual distortions would have been dictated by its original medium: it is likely to have been drawn on papyrus, placing no limit on length of the document but severely curtailing its width. Thus, distances from east to west are shown at larger scale than those from north to south, and the actual direction of roads running north to south is often ignored entirely. The usefulness of the map depended on the existence of the Roman roads themselves: a traveler, wisely keeping to the road, would not need to concern himself with direction; knowing the distance and the name of the next stop on the road would have been sufficient.

Age and Chronology

References to early Christianity on the map, as well as the use of the place name 'Constantinople' suggested an origin in the 4th century during the reign of Theodosius. Following the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century, scholars realized that the presence of Herculaneum, Oplontis, and Pompeii strongly suggested a much earlier genesis: first century, at the latest, with the Theodosian references representing later revisions.

The author of the manuscript - now preserved in the National Bibliothek in Vienna - is not known. Konrad Peutinger was a 15th-16th century humanist and antiquarian, who among other things had assembled one of the largest private libraries north of the Alps. The manuscript was discovered by Viennese scholar Conrad Celtes, who in 1507 gave it to Peutinger for safekeeping and publication. Eventually, it was printed to four sheets for inclusion in Abraham Ortelius Parergon. Jansson also included a piracy of Ortelius' version in his own atlas. The original would fade into obscurity, to be rediscovered in the 18th century and archived in the Viennese Imperial Library.

Publication History and Census

This map was engraved for inclusion in the 1837 edition of Atlas Complet Du Precis De La Géographie Universelle De M. Malte-Brun. The work was committed to lithograph in 1839 and the present lithographic example appeared in that edition. The separate map is not listed in OCLC, but the atlas does appear on the market.