List of Roman Held Cities and Towns

by MitBalkens

I am currently working to create a very detailed map of the Roman Republic in 85 BCE. In order to do this, I need to know what settlements were under Roman control in this year. I was wondering: does any such list exist?

Aka: What settlements were under Roman control in 85 BCE?

bigfridge224

The short answer is that the list you're looking for probably doesn't exist - certainly not if you're looking for something written by the Romans themselves. The Romans did not have the skills in cartography that we have in the modern world, and many would argue that their conceptualization and understanding of geography was completely different too, so it's probable that no such lists ever existed, and if they did they have not survived. The closest thing to what you're looking for would be the writings of geographers like Strabo - his work is a little later than what you're looking for, probably early 1st century AD, but if you ignore the obvious bits added to the empire since 85 BC then you should be able to use him.

The other most useful source is probably going to be epigraphy - inscriptions might tell you exactly when a new town was chartered, or might give clues as to when an existing one was incorporated into the empire. Your problem is going to be accurate dating - it's never easy to pin these things to specific years, so you might be left guessing for a fair number of places.

Probably your best option is to use the work of modern mapping projects. There have been quite a few, and they're really hot on linking their data sets and making their work open access. My recommendations would be to start with Pelagios, Pleiades and the Ancient World Mapping Centre.

I know this is not the most positive of answers, but I hope it helps - I'd be really excited to see how it turns out!