Pomponio Mela’s De situ orbis libri tres, a work written in around 44AD, is the oldest surviving geographical work in Latin. Based on earlier sources, both Greek and Roman, it was prepared for a non-specialist audience and in all likelihood did not originally contain maps. The earth is conceived as a sphere subdivided into five climatic regions, only two of which are habitable. The habitable region to the south is called, in a term derived from the Pythagoreans, Antichthon or “anti-world”, but the author himself appears uncertain about its existence. For this reason, he describes instead the northern habitable region known to him, or rather the areas of it considered most important and interesting. 

In the eighteenth century the book was used for the study of Latin. It was published in many editions, and that produced by John Reynolds in Exeter in 1711 was reprinted by various publishers for over a century: the Morbiato bequest includes the one printed in Eton in 1761 by the Editio Altera press. While only illustrating the regions known to the Latin author, the maps update in light of eighteenth-century ideas both the shapes of the continents and the basic elements of hydrography and relief, rendered with the so-called “molehill” technique.

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Pages on the Move: Itineraries

An ownership note reveals that in 1844 the book was in Liverpool, in the library of a certain Daniel Whyte. A label of the antiquarian bookshop Gaisser Books then locates the volume, certainly after 1940, in Maumee, Ohio.