The map that claimed a Roman coin proved Rome reached America

Herman Moll's 1709 map of the Roman Empire carries an extraordinary marginal note.

Herman Moll's 1709 historical map of the Roman Empire — two sheets joined, adapted from Guillaume Delisle's Theatrum Historicum — is best known for a single extraordinary claim engraved on it: that a Roman coin bearing the head of Augustus was found in an American mine, offered as evidence that Rome had reached the New World.

It is exactly the kind of learned speculation that delighted early-eighteenth-century readers, for whom the boundary between scholarship and wonder was still porous. The note tells us less about Roman shipping than about how the educated European public wanted the ancient world to be: vast, reaching, and connected to their own age of discovery.

The map itself is a serious piece of historical geography, mapping the provinces of the empire at its height — but it is this single sentence in the margin that has kept collectors talking for three hundred years.

Sources: British Library, Maps K.Top.118.30