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Until the Latin texts of Pomponius Mela’s Chorographia (43 CE) and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Greek scholarship provided the only documentary geographies on the Near East (Mela: Romer 1998; Pliny: cf. Murphy 2004). Historians such as Livy supplied some information, but not as part of a larger geographical project. For most Romans knowledge of Near Eastern geography arrived in the form of triumphal paintings, images including allegorical personifications of conquered cities to topographies, cityscapes, and panoramas depicting notable features or historical narratives of the victorious generals’ expeditions (Nicolet 1991: 69; Holliday 1997: 137ff; Murphy 2004: 154ff). Livy (37.59.3–5) reports that Scipio Asiaticus paraded 134 representations of captured Asian towns (oppidorum simulacra) in his 188 BCE triumph, and in his triumph of 61 BCE Pompey is said to have had inscriptions listing conquered regions and cities from Pontus to Arabia, alongside images (possibly geographical), and a trophy of the entire oikoumenē or orbis terrarum (Plut. Pomp. 45.1–3; Appian Mith. 17.117; Dio 37.21.2). Even Ovid (Ars Am. 1.213–228) recommended explaining the triumphal geographic paintings as an aid to flirtation, listing Mesopotamia, Armenia, and Persia, regions taken in Augustan campaigns, though the allegorical captive Persia was only ever anticipated of Gaius Caesar’s unrealized campaign (Nicolet 1991: 44). Agrippa’s world map was a grandiose version of the triumphal paintings, representing the world now conquered by Roman forces and the oikoumenē subjected to Roman imperium (cf. Holliday 1997: 137). He and his colleagues on the project mapped the world with a system similar to Eratosthenes’s sphragides (see below), using twenty-four regions each with length and width dimensions (Nicolet 1991: 101–102).¹²