TRANSIT

In the sixteenth century, an antique dealer in Augsburg, Konrad Peutinger, received a parchment showing the routes linking all the Roman cities. An immense cartographic compilation of obscure origins (was it copied by a monk in the thirteenth century? after a fourth-century original? itself inspired by a map prepared for Agrippa, the son-in-law of Augustus?), it is disproportionately long (6.82 x 0.34 meters) and contains some 6000 proper names and 550 sketched vignettes, themselves divided into three major types like the stars in a Michelin guide. Indeed, Peutingers Table is at once a map, a road plane, a travel guide. It is the synthetic vision of a network extending to the very edges of the empire (from Bordeaux all the way to Ceylon...). Schematically exact, though at the price of a host of errors, the Table is a stunning diagramm. It does not describe a route, nor does it describe all routes, it describes successive sections and junctions within a total network. The flows within the Empire cannot be traced with a single line: a road is like a vibrating string, it tightens when the traffic is intense (through corrections and shortcuts), it loosens up into curves at off-peak moments. the Table provides the key to the "Roman System": the Roman city is an articulated system of movements in all directions and its buildings, spread across the inhabited universe, are but the "vessels" or relays-points of this system. it is like a prefiguration of the atlas of cyberspace.

Jean Attali, The Roman System printed inMutations, Actar, 2000, Page 22