Chorography in the Time of Hadrian
Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellowship Research
Professor Janet Downie
Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellow, University of Victoria (BC, Canada)
Professor Janet Downie is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Victoria (BC, Canada). Her research focuses on Greek literature of the Roman imperial period, particularly the ways in which texts construct space, place, identity and cultural memory. She is the author of At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi (Oxford University Press, 2013) and co-editor, with Anna Peterson, of Greek Literary Topographies in the Roman Imperial World (Bloomsbury, 2025). Her current work brings literary analysis into dialogue with geography and cartography to explore how Greek writers imagined and represented the world of the Roman Empire.
About the project
Professor Downie’s project, Chorography in the Time of Hadrian, examines how Greek writers of the second century CE represented and organised geographical space. Taking Claudius Ptolemy’s systematic, mathematical Geographia as both a touchstone and a foil, the project brings together a group of contemporary texts that offer different, more qualitative ways of describing the inhabited world.
The book centres on four writers — Dionysius Periegete, Aelius Aristides, Pausanias and Arrian — and asks how each constructs space through distinctive literary forms, language and cultural perspectives. Rather than treating ancient geographical thought as a single developing tradition, the project reveals a plurality of ways of imagining world-space during the reign of Hadrian. It also follows the later lives of these texts through Late Antiquity, Byzantium and the early modern and modern periods, examining how their models of Greek space were reused and transformed in changing political, cultural and scientific contexts.
During her Lewis-Gibson Visiting Fellowship, Professor Downie will concentrate on Dionysius of Alexandria’s hexameter Periegesis of the inhabited world. Although Dionysius draws on geographical schemes familiar from mathematical geography, including a notional grid of parallels and meridians, his purpose is poetic rather than mathematical. The poem uses these spatial structures to create cultural connections and, in Professor Downie’s reading, to imagine the Roman Empire under Hadrian as Greek space.
She will also investigate the Periegesis’ later transmission, including its circulation in Latin translation and its adaptation as European geographical knowledge expanded. Work with Cambridge’s rare books, manuscripts and map collections will help trace how Dionysius’ ancient chorography acquired new meanings in pre-modern and early modern Europe. The project thus connects close literary analysis with the histories of geography, cartography and reception, asking how representations of space can encode cultural identity and how those representations change as they move across languages, periods and political worlds.