Samuel Ball Platner (December 4, 1863 – August 20, 1921) was an American classicist and archaeologist.
Platner was born at Unionville, Connecticut, and educated at Yale College. He taught at Western Reserve University and is best known as the author of various topographical works on ancient Rome, chief among them A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome, completed after Platner's death by Thomas Ashby and published in 1929; and as a contributor to the 1911 Britannica.
The topography of ancient Rome is the description of the built environment of the city of ancient Rome. It is a multidisciplinary field of study that draws on archaeology, epigraphy, cartography and philology. The word 'topography' here has its older sense of a description of a place, now often considered to be local history, rather than its usual modern meaning, the study of landforms.
The classic English-language work of scholarship is A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929), written by Samuel Ball Platner, completed and published after his death by Thomas Ashby. New finds and interpretations have rendered many of Platner and Ashby's conclusions unreliable, but when used with other sources the work still offers insights and complementary information.
A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome is a reference work written by Samuel Ball Platner (1863–1921).
The first edition was published in 1904; the second edition ('revised and enlarged') was published in 1911 (both: Allyn and Bacon, Boston).