Route 66 A. D.: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists - Tony Perrottet - Hardcover - 1ST

Chapter 1 Jupiter's Panorama It must have been like a film premiere at Cannes. Throngs of excited spectators filed their way into the heart of Rome, shamelessly ogling the latest fashions and pointing out the celebrities in their midst. An impatient crowd was soon milling outside the venue-an elegant, column-lined arcade called the Vipsania Colonnade, expressly built as a sort of open-air art gallery-where a sensational new opus was about to be unveiled. White-robed priests were busy sacrificing animals to guarantee the ongoing favor of the gods. Choruses of youths sang patriotic anthems. Silver fountains burbled in nearby gardens, while food vendors and beggars noisily worked the crowd. At last, this colorful audience of ancient Romans-everyone from perfumed aristocrats in their silk gowns and brilliant togas to impoverished slum dwellers in their grimy tunics-jostled to the foreground, all trying to have their observations heard above the cacophony. Looming above them was a dazzling spectacle-a map of the world as large as a drive-in movie screen, showing the three known continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Two thousand years later, it's easy to imagine the frisson of that heady scene-especially if you happen to be, as I was, piecing it together in the fabulous halls of the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan, a modern-day Roman temple whose interior gleams with marble and ceilings swarm with depictions of the pagan gods. I'd fled there to escape the first heat wave of summer-steam was rising from the sidewalks like the fumes from Hades-and besides, New York reality was starting to close in on me, in more ways than one. But in that silent refuge, surrounded by piles of musty, leather-bound volumes, I found myself easily transported back to that moment in Imperial Rome, circa 5 b.c., when the world's horizons suddenly opened. Few ancient citizens had even seen a street map before that day, let alone a chart of such divine ambition. The image would have been as futuristic then as the first satellite photos from NASA. Exhaustive research for the map had been orchestrated by a man named Marcus Agrippa-a Roman war hero who must qualify as one of the great anal retentives of history. In order to measure the world's dimensions, Agrippa had summoned the leading scientists to Rome and provided them with archives full of field coordinates accumulated by the Imperial Army. An elite corps of land surveyors was dispatched to plot every uncharted corner of Rome's domain; in addition, the captain of every ship was required to file charts of the coastlines he had navigated. This new geographical database was then applied to the accepted mythological model of the earth. (Ancient geographers knew the world was round, but believed that terra firma occupied only the northern hemisphere, and was surrounded by the uncrossable river ocean.) The result was, not surprisingly, a map of unprecedented accuracy. The emperor Augustus was presented with a miniature version for his palace; it was engraved in solid gold, with the provincial capitals marked by precious gems. But it was the monolithic image erected in the public colonnade that was the true triumph of Roman ingenuity. Sadly, not a single scrap has survived, although the tantalizing remarks of Latin authors allow us to speculate that it stretched sixty feet along the arcade and rose to thirty feet in height. The details may have been applied in pigment, but quite possibly it was one of the fabulous "paintings in stone" then fashionable in Rome-an interlocking pattern of polished marble, amethyst, and alabaster, with each piece carved in topographical relief by Greek craftsmen. To the crowd gathered in the colonnade that day, nothing could have been more enlightening. For a start, Romans discovered that the land masses of the earth together formed an ovaPerrottet, Tony is the author of 'Route 66 A. D.: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists - Tony Perrottet - Hardcover - 1ST' with ISBN 9780375504327 and ISBN 037550432X.