11-23-2005, 01:01 PM
all points happily taken (though on the tree and moss issue I believe there are regional variants. As a little boyscout I always learnt that moss grew on the West side of a tree (this being the primary direction where wind comes from in Northern Germany - but doesn't apply to e.g. east coast of England...
but if the knowledge of spatial representation was known to the Romans, why didn't they use it? Was it then a case of format? I.e. sth like a Peutinger table can be carried in a scroll, whereas an actual space representation of the world would have filled the floorspace of a small forum at any useful scale? Probably more likely, considering that the Forma Urbis is also a (more or less accurate) real space representation of the city of Rome... (OK, so I have answered my question above - unless this method of representation was only an issue when dealing with larger scales... :oops: )
Jasper - as for periploi, are there any Roman ones? Or are they all Greek (in the widest possible sense...)
C.
but if the knowledge of spatial representation was known to the Romans, why didn't they use it? Was it then a case of format? I.e. sth like a Peutinger table can be carried in a scroll, whereas an actual space representation of the world would have filled the floorspace of a small forum at any useful scale? Probably more likely, considering that the Forma Urbis is also a (more or less accurate) real space representation of the city of Rome... (OK, so I have answered my question above - unless this method of representation was only an issue when dealing with larger scales... :oops: )
Jasper - as for periploi, are there any Roman ones? Or are they all Greek (in the widest possible sense...)
C.
Christoph Rummel
