Thursday 27 May 2027 4:45pm to 5:45pm
Sidgwick G.21
Faculty of Classics, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DAProfessor Downie explores how Dionysius of Alexandria’s Periegesis adapts mathematical geography to imagine Hadrian’s empire as Greek space, and traces its sixteenth-century afterlife in the maps and scholarship of Sophianos and Ortelius.
Introduced by: Prof Ianthi Tsimpli
About
Claudius Ptolemy’s Geographia provides a touchstone for spatial knowledge and interest in the second century CE. His systematic and mathematical project also provides a foil for an extensive dossier of contemporary chorographic texts oriented rather towards the qualitative presentation of world space.
This seminar will focus on one text from this second-century dossier, Dionysius of Alexandria’s hexameter Periegesis of the inhabited world. I argue that Dionysius deploys some of the schematic tropes of mathematical geography – conceiving of space in terms of a notional grid of parallels and meridians – in service of a fundamentally cultural project: to imagine the Roman Empire under Hadrian as Greek space.
In the second part of the seminar, I explore the afterlife of Dionysius’ poem in the sixteenth century when, for antiquarians and intellectuals like Nikolaos Sophianos and Abraham Ortelius, Antonine chorographies provided useful precedents for mapping Greek space in new cultural, political, and scientific contexts.