Bologna, November 5th-6th 2026
Venue: Aula Tibiletti, Department of History and Cultures, via Zamboni, 38.
If you wish to participate, please get in contact with the organizers: Niklas Fröhlich (niklas.froehlich@ku.de),
Mattia Vitelli Casella (mattia.vitelli@unibo.it).
Strabo states twice in the Prolegomena of his Geography that he lives in a very favourable period
for geographical research, because Roman expansion and Roman rule had allowed knowledge to
increase significantly. In fact, many parts of the world were previously impossible to visit, and
therefore previous authors were not able to deal with them. With the Imperial Period, however, a
new era began in the Mediterranean world from many points of view, and certainly not least from a
geographical perspective. Not only were new lands discovered and described to the reading public,
but also the ‚old known world‘, of course, continued to be treated, both under the influence of the
new realities of the ‚Pax Romana‘ and on the basis of established, predominantly Greek, traditions
of geographical knowledge. The main question we therefore pose is: What was the way of
approaching Greek geographic knowledge in the literature during the Imperial age and into Late
Antiquity? And more precisely: Was it presented as a fundamental and unchanged matter, as
before? Was it used, but completely revised and updated with reference to the new situation? How
did the very concepts of geographic works and their approach to world description change with
regard to the modus operandi of an individual author? What role did the new opportunities for travel
and firsthand experiences play, as it is often emphasized, for example, in the case of the ‚travelling
author‘ Pausanias? How did such perspectives relate to established textual traditions and scholarly
desk research, as traditionally emphasized in the case of, for example, Claudius Ptolemy? What role
did established literary and scientific practices and genres play in this? What can a closer look on
documentary sources contribute to these issues?
And, last but not least: How were Greek literary forms and knowledge traditions taken up,
continued, or transformed by Latin authors? In fact, practically all Latin geographical texts fall
within this exact period, and throughout them, the question of dependence on and use of (Greek?)
sources is of central importance. The question also arises for Christian texts, such as the
Diamerisms (from around the 2nd/3rd century AD), which categorize the peoples of the earth on the
basis of biblical interpretations and various, heterogeneous sources, and whose Latin representatives
are all direct translations and adaptations of Greek originals. In order to incorporate these and other,
regularly understudied, Latin geographical texts from the imperial period (and their Greek sources)
more effectively, the conference is realized in cooperation with the Geographi Latini Online: the
Germany-based long-term editorial project (Universities of Eichstätt/Ingolstadt and Cologne) is
currently re-editing and re-exploring many of these texts both by means of new critical editions
with historical-philological commentaries and digital cartographic projections. Accordingly, the
conference will also explicitly include perspectives on new digital methods: How can the
geographical worldviews of the imperial era and their evolution be evaluated and represented, for
example, through digital projections? How can source dependencies and, conversely, innovations be
explored using modern (digital) corpus linguistics?
The conference will bring together these many subfields beyond disciplinary boundaries (history,
philology, patristics, geography, digital humanities etc.) and combine them in a joint exploration of
“Greek Geography in the Roman Imperial period.”
Conference Program
Thursday 5.11.
14:30 Opening Greetings
14:45 Opening Remarks (by the organizers)
15:00 S. Diederich: Questioni e prospettive sulla ricezione del sapere geografico greco nel mondo romano
(Opening lecture)
I Session
15:30 G. Cruz Andreotti, E. Castro Páez: Estrabón, geografía, romanización e imperialismo
15:50 A. Cristofori: Strabone e l’Estremo Oriente tra eredità di Alessandro e geografia augustea
16:10 F. Carriere: La Pace di Apamea e la rappresentazione dell’Asia nella Geografia di Strabone
16:30 Discussion – coffee break
17:00 V. Bucciantini: Misurare il Ponto Eusino: osservazioni sulle distanze nel Periplo di Menippo di Pergamo
17:20 S. Bianchetti: L’ ecumene romana nella Chorographia di Pomponio Mela
17:40 P. Di Benedetto: L’Eolide d’Asia nella rappresentazione dei geografi in età romana: tra ricezione e
riscrittura della tradizione
18:00 E. Filippini: Rappresentare la città: identità geografica e personificazioni cittadine nella monetazione
romana provinciale
18:20 Discussion
20:00 Dinner
Friday 6.11.
9:00 J.R. Reyes González: The Acts of the Apostles and Greek Geographical Knowledge in the Roman Imperial
Period. Itinerary, Autopsy, and Narrative Transformation
II Session
9:20 S. Kröner: Κατὰ τὸν Θρᾴκιον Βόσπορον – Ergo a faucibus Bospori. Traditionen der Periplous-Literatur
in der Kaiserzeit und der Naturalis historia?
9:40 A. Busetto: Geografia tra storia e mito: il Bosforo Tracio nei Bithynika di Arriano
10:00 M.E. De Luna: La Periegesi di Pausania: sulla geografia come ‘pellegrinaggio’ e come esperienza
intellettuale
10:20 A. Haushalter: Ptolémée, carrefour des traditions géographiques grecques et des pratiques
administratives romaines ? Le cas des provinces occidentales
10:40 Discussion – coffee break
III Session
11:20 E. Paganoni: Hellenistic Traditions in Solinus’ Description of Anatolia
11:40 F. Feraco: Le fonti geografiche greche di Ammiano Marcellino
12:00 E. Migliario: Le Alpi di Ammiano: fonti e problemi
12:20 Discussion
13:00 Lunch
14:30 E. Fallani: I confini dell’ecumene nelle Historiae adversus paganos di Orosio
14:50 A. Pierozzi: Aspetti di geografia greca nella Cosmographia di Giulio Onorio
15:10 Discussion
IV Session
15:20 V. Boano: Beyond Pliny’s Index: Exploring Greek Geographical Sources with a Computational
Approach
15:40 A. Karmann: TP-Online: Editing the Tabula Peutingeriana in the Digital Age – Opportunities and
Perspectives
16:00 J. Bigalke, J. Blumtritt, N. Fröhlich, T. Gengnagel: Geographi Latini Online (GLO): Chances and
Perspectives of a Digital Corpus of Latin Geographical Texts
16:20 Discussion
16:40 Conclusions (by the organizers)