It’s an image that hangs in countless history classrooms (or occupies a slide in teachers’ PowerPoints, at least). The Roman Empire, for some reason always salmon-colored, clearly delineated on a map. The boundaries of the empire look so precise; we see Roman territory and non-Roman territory, a neat geographical binary.
But where does this map come from?
You might think that, as conquerors of the Mediterranean world, the Romans would have recorded their conquests on maps like the one we see above. But you’d be wrong.