12,000 stadia (1,500 miles) in length, width, and height means that the city “has a footprint approximately equal in size to the entire land mass of the Roman empire”; it is “large enough to encompass . . . the world as John knew it.”5 It is probably depicted as square because the ancient ideal of perfection, especially for a city, was a square; indeed, Babylon was remembered as a square (Herodotus, History 1.178).
