Har kollat runt lite på nätet efter information och fick följandem svar på Roman Army Talk:

http://p200.ezboard.com/bromanarmytalk

There used to be a very good essay on the net called 'Stumbling through Gaul', which doesn't seem to be around anymore, but which concerned the use (or otherwise) of maps and intelligence by Caesar during the Gallic war. As far as I recall, the author contended that tactical military maps essentially didn't exist in antiquity - the closest thing to a modern map would have been something like the Peutinger Table (sp?) - a sort of diagram of distances between known cities on established routes. This would have helped a general know how long his troops had to march between cities A and B along road C, but not much about the lie of the land or the real positions of A, B or C in relation to anything else. For a general in the field, outside of the well travelled provinces, tactical intelligence would have been based solely on the reports of friendly natives and his own scouts.

This is quite a difficult concept for us to grasp - maps being such an intrinsic part of what we think of as tactical military planning. (In films, oddly, Romans and other 'ancients' invariably have a giant map drawn on rawhide, laced onto a frame! Some myths die hard, I guess...)

You can get a very useful look at how the Romans saw their world in a book "Rome and the Enemy" by Susan P. Mattern, University of California Press, 1999. The subtitle is Imperial Strategy in the Principate. There is a lengthy chapter called The Image of the World, which deals with the Roman view of geography, maps, etc.
She writes in the chapter: "Ancient sources, as noted above (earlier in the chapter), assume that it is only after military intervention that one can expect detailed information about a geographical region."
Earlier in the chapter she notes: "The Romans inhabited a world without modern land surveying techniques, without aerial or satellite photography, and without the compass. The bird's eye view was not available to them; the only reliable way to acquire information about an area was to march through it, ideally with an army."
To some extent, obviously, the Romans also used information obtained from merchants, other travelers and captured or defecting enemies. It still presented a linear view, like an itinerary, not a wide spatial view. That would still be true for a time for an area the army had marched through.
The book is an interesting discussion of the Romans' own strategic world view.

/Primus