A most attractive copy of this standard text of the ancient geographer Pomponius Mela, In the version of Pomponius Mela edited for publication by the German classical scholar and librarian Johann Friedrich Gronow (Gronovius). This copy is distinguished by its delightful contemporary "prize binding" of vellum with a large ornate gilt figure on both covers of Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the arts, holding a spear and a shield with the crest of the city of The Hague, with an owl on the left, a stack of books on the right, and the legend 'Hagae Comitis' below. This image was based on the engraving "Minerva met het wapen van Den Haag" created by the Dutch engraver and printmaker Pieter Willem van Megen (1750–1785).

A most attractive copy of this standard text of the ancient geographer Pomponius Mela, In the version of Pomponius Mela edited for publication by the German classical scholar and librarian Johann Friedrich Gronow (Gronovius). This copy is distinguished by its delightful contemporary "prize binding" of vellum with a large ornate gilt figure on both covers of Minerva, goddess of wisdom and the arts, holding a spear and a shield with the crest of the city of The Hague, with an owl on the left, a stack of books on the right, and the legend 'Hagae Comitis' below. This image was based on the engraving "Minerva met het wapen van Den Haag" created by the Dutch engraver and printmaker Pieter Willem van Megen (1750–1785).

The earliest Roman geographer, Pomponius Mela followed the Greek intellectual tradition in positing that there must be a southern landmass to balance the northern hemisphere, inhabited by Antichthones (his term meaning "those opposite to the earth"). His De situ orbis, which set out a full account of the then-known world, was first published in 1471. This Gronovius version, here in the third Leiden edition, includes the famous world map in which a southern continent is clearly defined: the "early notion of a fifth continent and that notion's important historical development as an intermingling of fact and fiction. The phantom of Terra Australis, an unknown south-land, haunted the minds and maps of cosmographers for more than two millennia… The landmasses of the northern hemisphere needed a counter-balance in the south. These speculations… were still influential in the eighteenth century until the time of James Cook. It was felt that an undiscovered southern continent had to exist because the known land masses of the southern hemisphere were not sufficient to balance those of the northern half of the globe…" (Schilder, Australia Unveiled, pp. 7-8).

Petrus Bertius's engraved folding map (Orbis Terrarum ex mente Pomponi Melae delineatus a P. Bertio Christianissimi Regis Geographo), created for the Gronovius editions, combines ancient and modern worlds. Rather than reproducing the distorted geography of the Roman original, he bases it on a more seventeenth-century framework, overlaying it with the place names and political divisions of classical antiquity. Ancient regions, Roman provinces, tribal territories and landmarks are shown in their correct modern locations, allowing eighteenth-century readers to relate the geography of the classical world to the map as they knew it.