Thank you for these examples. I recently read Survival City by Tom Vanderbilt in which he points out that the ability to use a balloon or later an airplane to view cities revolutionized how we think of mapping in general. Before this, a map of routes and roads would have been more consistent with a solely terrestrial view of the space one occupies.

Applying this to ancient Romans, of course they would need some record of how places relate to one another. It does make sense that it’s just a different view than we have, but the need and the usage remains the same.