Seldom are visitors to the Manuscript Collection of Austria's National Library in Vienna permitted to inspect its set of eleven parchment segments that together form an elongated, squat, and not quite complete map of the Roman world, the so-called Peutinger map. The bold manipulation of landmasses, the detailed plotting of land routes with names in Latin, and the vibrancy of the color on most of the segments are just three among the wealth of impressive features that at once strike the viewer. Here is a major map that in its reshaping of continents recalls the futuristic Atlantropa project devised by Herman Sörgel (1885–1952). Altogether, however, it is a map without close match in any period or culture worldwide. Not least because autopsy is inevitably such a rare privilege, the primary purpose of this book is to render the map more widely accessible and more comprehensible with the support of up-to-date scholarship and technology. At the same time, the opportunity is taken to reconsider the map's design, purpose, history, and significance in the light of current ideas and methods.

The book proceeds on the basis of the long-standing view that the map itself is not an original creation, but a copy at several removes of a lost Roman forerunner. Such copying is the typical means by which texts from antiquity have been preserved. Even so, a vast range of classical authors' works no longer survives.