Visualising battle in image and text: reading Kromayer against Polybius

This chapter explores how the interplay between different narratives of the battle at Lake Trasimene, from different periods of time and in different media – Polybius’ account and Kromayer's map in Antike Schlachtfelder – enhances our understanding of the cultural specifics of visualising battle. The chapter argues that we should treat these two texts as intertexts, each of which is informed by culturally specific narrative strategies. The first part shows that battle maps such as Kromayer's presuppose a specific viewing culture that developed only after the Napoleonic Wars. A closer analysis of what is characteristic of this early twentieth-century visualisation of the battle prompts a fresh look at Polybius’ verbal account of the same event. Traditional concepts of visualisation such as enargeia do not work here. Instead, Polybius relies on a broader, cognitive experience of the battle, engendered through word choice, grammar and syntax. Instead of topographical precision, which is key to modern modes of visualising battle, Polybius privileges a more cognitively realistic re-experience of the event.