Reference edition:

P. Schnabel, Die Weltkarte des Agrippa als wissenschaftliches Mittelglied zwischen Hipparch und Ptolemaeus, «Philologus» 90 (1935), 405-40: Demensuratio prouinciarum, 425-31.

In the context of the interests of the Romans for descriptive geography, of a pragmatic type with a predominantly political-military purpose unlike the more scientific interests of the Greeks, the short and schematic work, probably written for scholastic use, arouses particular attention because, together with the Divisio orbis terrarum (probably slightly earlier, see file), is useful for the reconstruction of the map of Agrippa, exhibited in Rome in the Vipsania porticus. As the name implies, it shows the measurements of length and width and the distances that describe the 24 zones into which Agrippa had divided the oikoumene: it starts from the extreme east of the known world, with India, continues with Europe, north Africa, Arabia, Ethiopia, ending with the islands and with Britain in the extreme north-west. The two areas of Asia Minor are missing, probably skipped by mistake, while Italy is divided into two parts, one southern and one northern. Of each area it records the mountains and seas that delimit it, the extension (often incorrect) and sometimes also provides information on cities and rivers; quite exceptionally for India it reports some details on the cultivation of pepper and on the typical animals (ubi piper nascitur et elephanti, dracones, sphingae, siptaci). The editio princeps of the text dates back to 1475, printed in Milan by Boninus Mombritius in the volume of Girolamo's Chronicon: it is in fact a 9th-century codex of the Geronimian Chronicon, kept at Merton College, Oxford, the archetype of the other 14 mss. which contain the Demensuratio. Only three paragraphs are contained in a ms. of a few decades earlier preserved in Monaco. The author of the work is unknown and the attribution to a Ieronimus prespiter, which can be read in a Vatican code of the fourteenth century, has no foundation. Since after Pliny Agrippa's name is never mentioned in writings that have his map as a source, it was probably lost. The different ordering of the material in the Demensuratio compared to the Divisio orbis terrarum demonstrates that its derivation from Agrippa's work is independent and probably not direct, but compiled on a reduced copy, different from the one from which the Divisio draws (Detlefsen). The dating is variously placed: Detlefsen places it between the reform of Diocletian, who instituted the insularum provincia around 297, and the Historiae adversus paganos of Orosius (about 417), whose information on the island provinces closely follows that of the Demensuratio, although leaning towards a late date. Brodersen places it decisively in the fifth century. [R. Tabacco]