Andy Merrills’ book forms part of a recent vein of scholarship that looks anew at Roman representations of Egypt. Several key studies have focused on Nilotic landscapes as reflective of attitudes toward the space, place, and culture of Egypt (e.g. M. J. Versluys, Aegyptiaca Romana: Nilotic Scenes and the Roman Views of Egypt (2001); C. Barrett, Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (2019)). While M. also engages with this well-trodden body of evidence, his expertise in geographical literature allows him to survey it from a fresh vantage point. Indeed, M. states that he was drawn to the Nile not because of specific questions about the river system, but because Roman interest in it (‘almost forensic scrutiny’, 16) was so great that the Nile can be used as a case study better to understand Roman geographical thought more broadly. His goal is to complicate the influential but, he suggests, outdated approach to historical geography pioneered by Claude Nicolet, to reveal a more diverse and less political way of thinking about and describing the world.
Ch. 1 begins with the so-called map of Agrippa, which, though it probably did not include the Nile, is pivotal to understanding historical geography. M. offers a useful caution against over-reading the scanty evidence. To replace interpretations that read the map as akin to an archive, resulting from and projecting imperial ideologies, M. suggests that we employ the ‘art and text’ approach prevalent in recent studies of material culture: if there is a single thing we know of the map, it is that it was on public display in the Porticus Vipsania, open to viewers’ variable interpretations. The rest of the chapter turns to a text, Vitruvius, and an artwork, the Nile Mosaic from Palestrina.
Although the responses that M. reconstructs are based upon literary sources, and thus chiefly reflect elite attitudes, he turns to the issue of popular reception in ch. 2. Here M. discusses how the spectacle of the triumph introduced geography to the masses. He explores the common metaphor of the personified river, and his point that sculptural representations of rivers — the Nile, the Tigris, the Rhine — were rather generic is well taken. Crowds readily understood that rivers symbolised far-off places and imperial conquests, but had less interest in differentiating between them. In ch. 3, M. focuses on several contexts in Pompeii with Nilotic landscapes. His discussion is readable and useful. He argues that those examples that were large-scale and immersive (compared to small-scale vignettes) ‘forced the spectator to reflect on his own position as a viewer’ (128), reinforcing the perspective of a person at the top of the socio-political hierarchy. M. is to be commended, too, for asking how women and slaves might have responded to the imagery, at once invited to share in what M. terms the ‘managerial gaze’ (138), while also distanced from the leisure and control that gaze implied.
Ch. 4 shifts to the question of how knowledge of the Nile figured into metaphysical discourses — principally philosophical (Lucretius, Seneca, Plutarch), but also ritual, explored through discussion of the sanctuary of Isis in Pompeii. Much of the argument of that case study hangs upon a small building in the courtyard, which housed a subterranean cistern that M. argues (following Robert Wild, Water in the Cultic Worship of Isis and Sarapis (1981)) would have provided symbolic Nile water for use in ceremonies, because it would have been liable to overflow during heavy rains. Although there is much to appreciate in M.'s erudite treatment of the texts and also the sanctuary's paintings (where images of the river abound), the discussion of ritual and belief is less balanced. The local cult may well have used water from the cistern in their rituals, but the argument regarding its function would have been stronger if it had relied on more robust documentation. M. might also have looked farther afield to the extensive evidence for other sites associated with Isis and Serapis around the empire, painstakingly documented over the last few decades. Well preserved though it is, the sanctuary in Pompeii does not represent the diversity of belief and practice in the Isiac cults, and cannot alone provide an adequate counterpoint to philosophical texts that range from the first century b.c.e to the second century c.e.
Chs 5 and 6 return to M.'s special area of expertise: the relationship between literature and scientific knowledge about geography. In ch. 5, M. shows that even as itineraries were intended to inform their readers, they also simplified geographical knowledge, with the result that specific sites and landmarks could slip out of place, appearing in different orders according to the agenda of the account. In ch. 6, he shows how poets exploited geographical knowledge, translating ‘the confusing geography of the world into a convenient imperial grammar’ (277).
All in all, M. succeeds in offering a rich example of a new way to write historical geography, rejecting monolithic explanations in favour of complicated, multivalent understandings. The book is at its best when dealing with texts, but M. has done an admirable job of tracing the connections between literary and artistic representations, revealing how readers and writers, artists and viewers received and in turn disseminated knowledge about their world.
