Dimensuratio provinciarum

Dimensuratio provinciarum, the "Measure of Provinces", is one of two geographical texts of the Late Roman Empire, the other being Divisio orbis terrarum. They were edited, together with Agrippa's geographical Commentarii by P. Schnabel in 1935.^[1] Their image of the world was deeply based on Agrippa's Commentarii, and perhaps on his world map, which inscribed in marble by Augustus and displayed in the Porticus Vipsania at Rome.^[2] The Dimensuratio, which was used by Alfred the Great in his geographic treatise,^[3] formed a link in the persistence of classical tradition, and even elements of Agrippa's Commentarii, in medieval geographies.^[4]

The work was subsequently lost, then rediscovered in the fifteenth century.^[5]

Notes

1. Schnabel, "Die Weltkarte des Agrippa als wissenschaftliches Mittelgleid zwischen Hipparch und Ptolemaeus", Philologus 90 (1935:405-40): Agrippa, Commentarii, pp. 405-24; Dimensuratio provinciarum, pp 425-31; Divisio orbis terrarum, pp 432-40. The three works were previously edited by A. Riese, 1878.
2. LacusCurtius: "Porticus Vipsania"
3. Jerzy Linderski, "Alfred the Great and the Tradition of Ancient Geography", Speculum 39.3 (July 1964:434-439)
4. Linderski 1964:439.
5. Too recently to have been included in the inclusive list of Sicco Polenton, a Paduan humanist, completed in 1437, according to Dorothy M. Robathan, "A Fifteenth-Century History of Latin Literature", Speculum 7.2 (April 1932:239-248) p. 242.