Pausanias_Travel_Writing_in_Ancient Greece [Maria_Pretzler]

5. A Sense of Space: Landscape and Geography
coastline listing place names or landmarks, in linear fashion, but they
hardly provide any sense of the layout of the landscape in two dimensions,
as a modern map would do. Travellers plodding along the road at hardly
more than walking speed were more concerned with the next inn or fork
in the road than with the general lie of the land, and it seems that their
linear view of the world, together with the sailor’s focus on coastlines,
continued to define how most people thought about topography. The
Peutinger Table, a medieval copy of a late antique Roman road map,
provides a visual representation of this literally pedestrian perspective
(Fig. 8). 28
It was drawn some time after Ptolemy’s map and includes a
similar area, namely the Roman empire and Asia as far as India. The
results are, however, very different: the regions around the Mediterranean
appear as three parallel strips of land, with central Europe on top, Italy
turned sideways to fill most of the centre, and Africa at the bottom. Like
a modern diagram of a public transport system, the Peutinger Table is not
concerned with reproducing actual topography; instead it focuses on the
communication lines, indicating which roads lead to particular places, the
number of stations between large cities and points where routes intersect.
Geographical features are included to indicate where roads meet with coasts,
mountain ranges or rivers, but they do not add up to a comprehensive
overview of a ‘global’ geography. In literature the periplous stood at the
beginning of this long tradition of describing landscapes in linear fashion.
The early Hellenistic Periplous of the Great Sea and its sparse description
of Attica were introduced in the previous chapter. It describes coasts
in some detail, including smaller harbours and landmarks, but the inland
is ignored almost completely.
Arkadia lies in the interior and comes down to the sea below Lepreon. There
are cities inland, and the biggest ones are these: Tegea, Mantinea, Heraia,
Orchomenos, Stymphalos. There are also other cities. The coastal voyage of
the Lepreates’ territory is 100 stadia. 29 (Pseudo-Skylax 44)
The author of the Periplous justifies a quick tour of the interior of the
Peloponnese because Arkadia had some claim to Triphylia, a region on the
west coast of the Peloponnese. The Arkadian cities are listed in no apparent
geographical order. One might be surprised that a text that describes
a coastal voyage mentions an inland region at all. For the Greeks, whose
cities lined up around the coasts of the Mediterranean ‘like frogs around
the pond’, 30 there were not many inland regions worth writing about, but
mainland Greece was something of an abnormality in this respect, because
some of its famous ancient cities were not located close to the coast.
Strabo’s treatment of Greece shows a strong influence of the periplous
approach. Although he aims to provide a universal geography his grasp of
inland regions remains surprisingly vague. 31
Again, Arkadia provides a
good test case:
67