Gripla - 01.01.1984, Side 265

A NOTE ON THE SHAPE OF ROME IN FBRS 261
The description of Rome in Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia is
clearly related:
Italiæ caput Roma est, ut diximus, civitas a Romulo constructa.
Romani caput imperii; ad formam leonis ob insignem sui domina-
tionem formata . . . Aurelianus imperator ipsam muris firmioribus
cinxit, et fecit templum solis. Hujus caput est a ponte Tiberis usque
ad primitiva Romuli mœnia: later utrimque ædificia palatiorum
constructa; unde et Lateranus dicitur, ubi palatium est, olim Con-
stantini, nunc Domini Papæ . . . Habet ergo Roma formam, ut dixi,
Leonis, sicut Brundusium formam cervi, Carthago bovis, Troja
equi.6
The immensely popular thirteenth-century encyclopaedia, L’Image du
Monde, attributed to Gossouin or Gautier of Metz, also contains a note
on the ‘theromorphous’ cities of Europe:
Si y a citez et regions qui prennent leur nons de bestes qui habitent
en cele terre. Si en ont les citez formes prises: Dont Roume a
fourme de lyon, et Troie la grant fourme de cheval.7
And a picture bearing the caption Roma edijicata a muodo de lione is
found in an illustrated manuscript of the thirteenth-century Italian Liber
Ystoriarum Romanorum (see figure below).8
6 Otia Imperialia, ed. G. Leibnitz, Scriptores Rerum Brunsvicensium (1707), II,
secunda decisio, ix, ‘De situ Romæ’, 767; cit. Graf, op. cit., I, 10. As Doberentz
notes (Z.f.d.Ph. 12 [1881], 415), most of Gervase’s account of Rome is taken from
the Mirabiiia Urbis Romae. This well-known pilgrim’s handbook, however, makes
no mention of the lion-shaped ground-plan of the city. Doberentz does not include
this passage in his discussion of Gervase’s borrowings from the Imago Mundi
(ibid., 415-418).
7 L’Image du Monde de Maitre Gossouin, ed. O. H. Prior (1913), 130/4-6,
‘D’Aufrique et de ses regions’; cf. Caxton’s translation, Mirrour of the World, ed.
O. H. Prior, Early English Text Society, Extra Series 110 (1912), 94/3-7.
8 The drawing, from the Hamburg ms. of the Liber Ystoriarum Romanorum
(dated c. 1280-1300), col. 107B, is reproduced here from Ernesto Monaci, ed.,
Storie de Troja et de Roma ..., Miscellanea della R. Societá Romana di Storia
Patria (1920), LII (cf. 298 n., and Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, ed., Biblio-
theca Uffenbachiana Universalis [1729-31], III, 107, no. CXXXV). The picture
does not appear to illustrate the surrounding text (unless it refers obliquely to
Domitian’s programme of ‘urban renewal’ described earlier on the same page,
Storie ..., 296/23ff.). Monaci (LlIIff.) associates the drawing with the lion-motif
used on coins issued by Brancaleone degli Andalö who held dictatorial powers in