Do I not like this!

Indeed I do! It's a diagram I came across in The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art by Malcolm Bull (pub. Penguin, 2006).

This highly readable book explores the way that the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome was reconstructed and remodelled to fit the allegorical fantasies of Renaissance art. It's a mythology that continues to resonate through Western art today.

One of the pleasures of looking at Renaissance and post-Renaissance paintings is to contemplate the physical characteristics of the landscape in which the figures disport themselves. Malcolm Bull's diagram quite cleverly throws all this away and reduces the landscape of classical mythology to a simple set of Cartesian (x-y) coordinates. The dominant locations at the top of the y-axis are Mounts Olympus and Parnassus. At the subordinate base of this axis are Hades/Forge and Arcadia. The horizontal x-axis moves across from productive activity on the left to leisure on the right.

While the gods, in their adventures, move around this xy-plane, their natural home loci are shown. At the central intersection (the crossroads) is stationed Mercury, the messenger of the gods. From this neutral position he keeps himself busy by moving freely throughout all sectors.

I love the reductive logic of this diagram. It would be great fun to invent a new geography of this mythical landscape by combining its concept with painted landscapes we have seen of classical scenes and actual maps of the seas and land masses as we know of them today.