Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Wednesday, January 22, 2014 in HART, Lectures, VRC.

Richard Talbert, the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of History and Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will deliver the Archaeological Institute of America lecture at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, January 28, at the Nashville Parthenon. His lecture is entitled “The Magnificent Peutinger Map: Roman Cartography at its Most Creative.”

Talbert’s historical interests within antiquity are broad and varied, ranging from Spartans and western Greeks to government and society in the Roman empire, and above all in recent years mapping, travel and worldview. The establishment of Chapel Hill’s unique Ancient World Mapping Center followed his publication of the groundbreaking Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000).

Much of his major work, Rome’s World: the Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press, 2010), is a digital presentation, enabling readers to engage with the Peutinger Map more closely than ever before. The Peutinger Map is the only map of the Roman world to come down to us from antiquity, and Talbert offers a reinterpretation and appreciation of the map as a masterpiece of both mapmaking and imperial Roman ideology. He proposes that the map’s true purpose was not to assist travelers along Rome’s highways but rather to celebrate the restoration of peace and order by Diocletian’s tetrarchy.

Free and open to the public, Talbert’s lecture is sponsored by the Nashville Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and Vanderbilt’s department of classical studies. Those who plan to attend the lecture are encouraged to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat.