Muted images of ancient Rome Elisha Ann Dumser YVES PERRIN, ITINÉRAIRES ROMAINS. DOCUMENTS DE TOPOGRAPHIE ET D’ARCHÉO- LOGIE HISTORIQUES POUR L’HISTOIRE DE ROME (DE SCIPION À CONSTANTIN) (Auso- nius éditions, Mémoires 51; Bordeaux 2018). Pp. 585, fgs. 1495. ISSN 1283-2995; ISBN 978-2- 35613-224-6. EUR 60. Visualizations — maps, plans, drawings, diagrams, photographs and the like — are omni- present within the felds of archaeology and Roman topography. Whether created by hand or with digital tools, in their most familiar usage they graphically document, record and present information. While they may seem to represent the ‘facts’ of a site, limited evidence surviving from antiquity often requires visualizations to incorporate hypothesis and extrapolation. At their most complex, graphic documents are a means to present an analysis or interpretation of a complex topic. Visual documents of varying forms and functions comprise the heart of Y. Perrin’s ambitious volume, Itinéraires romains. The variety and sheer number of graphic doc- uments are the greatest strengths of the book. Its weaknesses lie in the acontextual presentation and debilitatingly small scale of the images, aspects which ultimately undermine the volume’s utility. Yet one cannot but welcome a project focused upon gathering, and at times creating, visual evidence pertaining to the ancient city of Rome. Perrin’s opus has collected over 1495 distinct ‘documents’; the overwhelming majority are visual in nature, supplemented by an occasional primary source (text) in French translation. Some documents relate to the traditional interests of Roman topographers in maps and plans that describe the location or appearance of man- made features. Others move well beyond the narrow confnes of the topographic tradition into the realm of cultural geography to map or otherwise graphically represent economic, social, cultural and religious aspects of ancient Roman life. For many topics, a brief introduction, often limited to a few sentences framing any issues or debates, precedes the documents. Each image has a short descriptive caption, but further commentary regarding an image is rare. Bibliogra- phy, if listed at all, is limited to the sources from which images were adapted. Rather than following lexical tradition and alphabetizing his subject-mater, Perrin orga- nizes the material into 5 sections: Part I addresses the rôle of L’Urbs within the broader Roman world. Part II centers on communal structures and the chronology of Rome from the 3rd c. B.C. through the early 4th c. A.D. Part III presents buildings located in the city center along with their urban context. Part IV covers the same topic for Rome’s outlying regions. Part V introduces select suburban sites, such as the port of Ostia, villas and imperial residences. An Appendix contains documents related to the methodology of historical archaeology. I: “De l’Orbis à l’Urbs (Orbis, Oikouménè, Imperium Romanum, Italia, Latium)” Dominating this section are maps. Typically, the base image is the Mediterranean basin, and imposed upon it are labels and shaded areas to represent a variety of topics: the expansion of the Roman empire over time; the career paths of well-known individuals; political and admin- istrative divisions of the empire; expansion of citizenship over time; the fow and trade of agricultural products and natural resources; home towns of Roman authors; urban density across the empire; sites of specifc types of buildings; road systems. The breadth of topics is fascinating, but the small scale of each map (typically 4 x 3 inches or smaller) coupled with their dense labeling makes these difcult to read. The image quality tends toward pixellated rather than crisp, suggesting that many were made with non-vector software. Part I contains 54 documents. II: “Urbs – Roma (Évolutions historiques et structures de la cité du III e siècle a.C. au IV e siècle p.C.)” Maps and primary source texts are the main types of documents (with a total of 165) in Part II, but tables and reconstruction drawings appear occasionally too. These represent a broad range of topics: Rome’s physical topography; ancient visual and textual descriptions of the https://doi.org/10.1017/S1047759419000412 Published online by Cambridge University Press